The Honors Program invites students to join a centuries-old conversation about what makes for a meaningful and well-lived life. Through participation in our Socratic-style seminars, students will become exceptional in the arts of communication and dialectic, learn to respectfully challenge themselves and others, and become more discerning with respect to the most important intellectual and ethical issues that confront us as human beings and citizens today.
Humane Letters majors are automatically in the Honors Program. The major is for those who want an especially deep engagement with classic texts and the perennial questions that matter most to us as individuals and members of a greater community, including those that inform the greatest scientific discoveries and artistic creations of our inherited tradition. In addition to preparing students for graduate study, this major will prepare students to become highly capable and inspiring educators in K–12 character-based, classical schools.
Key Features
- Six classic text-based seminars engaging the greatest thinkers, scientists, writers, and artists who have contributed to the “great conversation.”
- Disciplinary Honors courses that deepen your understanding of the foundations of that discipline, whether in STEM, health sciences, business, or the humanities.
- A minimum of 80 hours of service, in which you put into practice what you have learned about human nature and community, contributing meaningfully to the common good.
- An Honors Senior Thesis, in which you explore the questions that have moved you most deeply during your time studying the classic texts.
- Rich abroad experiences, in which you will walk in the very places where the people you read lived and created their works.
- Flexible enough to encompass any double major or dual degree option at The University of Tulsa.
Required Classic Texts Seminars
- HON 2123 Three Ancient Cities: Athens, Rome, Jerusalem
- HON 2143 The Long Middle Ages
- HON 2223 The Birth of Modernity
- HON 2243 The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
- HON 3123 The Foundations of Natural Science
- HON 3143 The Aesthetic and Ethical Foundations of Music