Harrison Middleton University’s Doctor of Arts degree program is based on the belief that primary source documents provide unique opportunities for the past to be explored.  The coursework portion of the Doctor of Arts degree at Harrison Middleton University is primarily organized around the Great Books of the Western World and the educational philosophies espoused by Mortimer Adler, Robert Hutchins, and Clifton Fadiman, among others, as well as the Board of Directors of the Encyclopaedia Britannica and the Great Books of the Western World Committee of Consultants.

The Doctor of Arts degree program consists of The Great Conversation: The Cornerstone Course (4 credit hours), 48 credit hours of coursework divided into two 24 credit hour blocks consisting of readings from the Great Books of the Western World including syntopical readings on topics, sub-topics, references, cross-references, and additional readings from the Bibliography of Additional Readings, and lastly, the Doctoral Capstone Course (8 credit hours).  The capstone course proposal requires the creation of a significant original work. The work must be an original contribution to knowledge and demonstrate the student’s proficiency as an independent investigator.   The doctoral capstone proposal must be approved by the student’s instructional team and the dean of the graduate college.

By using a combination of primary source documents from Great Books of the Western World, as well as other primary source documents from Great Books Foundation publications, the Annals of American History, additional readings from the Bibliography of Additional Readings, and great art, the Doctor of Arts student will craft a program of study rich in primary sources crucial to the study of the great ideas. Using these primary source documents, the program of study focuses on extensive research activity on one or a combination of the great ideas: art, animal, aristocracy, art, astronomy and cosmology, beauty, being, cause, chance, change, citizen, constitution, courage, custom and convention, definition, democracy, desire, dialectic, duty, education, element, emotion, eternity, evolution, experience, family, fate, form, God, good and evil, government, habit, happiness, history, honor, hypothesis, idea, immortality, induction, infinity, judgment, justice, knowledge, labor, language, law, liberty, life and death, logic, love, man, mathematics, matter, mechanics, medicine, memory and imagination, metaphysics, mind monarchy, nature, necessity and contingency, oligarchy, one and many, opinion, opposition, philosophy, physic, pleasure and pain, poetry, principle, progress, prophecy, prudence punishment, quality, quantity, reasoning, relation, religion, revolution, rhetoric, same and other, science, sense, sign and symbol, sin, slavery, soul, space, state, temperance, theology, time, truth, tyranny and despotism, universal and particular, virtue and vice, war and peace, wealth, will, wisdom, world.

In essence, our program of study embraces the concept that one’s natural intellectual curiosity should guide learning, the notion that learning is a life-long pursuit for wisdom and the idea that such wisdom can be furthered by the interdisciplinary study of the greatest works of the last 3,000 years in Imaginative Literature, Natural Science, Philosophy and Religion, and Social Science.