“Let Them Be Born in Wonder”

The 2025-26 academic year began with a fell note of doom for the humanities. Dr. Jenn Frey at Tulsa University had built a beautiful Honors College grounded on the Great Books, seminar discussion, and service learning (an experiential model intended to help students ground their intellectual discoveries in practical, hands-on service within specific communities). After taking her program to a position of national prominence, Frey was abruptly released from her deanship, and her program pivoted to look like every other program at every other college. (She tells her story here).

At the same time, stunning news rocked academic X—Indiana public universities announced they were shuttering or combining over 400 academic programs. The University of Chicago declared a pause on graduate-student enrollment in the classics (and several other programs). Ironically, the Chronicle of Higher Education chose this moment to publish Building a Thriving Humanities Program, which, for $179, promises readers will be able to:

• Better interpret and explain the data on humanities enrollments.

• Communicate how successful humanities programs have built student interest.

• Describe how humanities study contributes to student success.

• Translate skills learned in humanities courses into attributes employers seek.

• Understand the obstacles to expanding the humanities and envision solutions.

Such advice from the leading journal of higher education is itself a token of just how fully higher education has let go of its once-ubiquitous grasp of the humanities’ purpose. When no one remembers why the humanities matter, such programs will indeed close.

When no one remembers why the humanities matter, such programs will indeed close. There is another story happening at the same time, however, on the fringes of higher education. This story looks back to a specific moment for inspiration: John Senior’s Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas. This program did not last long, but it has produced significant fruit. While this essay focuses on specific college programs that illustrate a direct connection to Senior’s project, it is worth noting that enough K-12 schools have now been founded in a similar vein that Crisis Magazine classifies a genre of “John Senior Schools” as part of the growing educational renaissance in American K-12 education.

There is another story happening at the same time, on the fringes of higher education. As the story goes, Senior was a dissatisfied professor at the University of Kansas in the late 1960s. While Paris faced its famous student riots and Berkeley students chanted, “Hey, Ho, Western Civ has got to go!,” Senior did the quiet work of a classics professor in a relatively obscure, Midwestern state university. Nevertheless, his students failed to grasp the joy, the beauty, and the wonder of what they were reading; the university had disincentivized the interdisciplinary approach to knowledge that Senior believed essential to grasping the traditional humanities. But, also, the classroom environment was not enough. Senior had spent time in his youth riding rail cars, herding cattle, and working itinerantly; these experiences had put him in touch with reality in a deep way. In conjunction with two professor friends (both also Catholic), Senior submitted a grant application to the National Endowment for the Humanities.

His grant request envisioned a different approach: an Integrated Humanities Program (IHP) worthy of the name. Students would read through the Western canon, memorize vast portions of poetry, experience co-taught lecture courses, and do so immersed in experiences of natural beauty. In a turn of events nearly unimaginable to a contemporary academic, Senior got the funding. In 1972, the IHP enrolled its initial students. The program ran for six years. Senior’s vision grew into reality, and a shocking result occurred: His enrollment boomed. Senior added trips to Europe, where he and his fellow professors would guide students into the culture and tradition of the continent not through readings and slideshows of paintings but through physical encounters with the remnants of past cultural glory.

By 1978, Senior had one of the largest programs at the University of Kansas. His funding was cut for two reasons: STEM majors were dropping their quantitative, potentially lucrative majors and enrolling in English, history, and philosophy degrees, and previously agnostic or atheistic students were converting to Catholicism. Both factors provoked levels of academic jealousy, and the death of the IHP stands as a monument to that pettiness. As Dr. Michael Pakaluk describes,

Worried by the conversions apparently, combined with the non-technical character of the studies, the University of Kansas first strangled the IHP by no longer counting its courses for general liberal education credits. And then [they] suppressed it, by reducing it to a single humanities class, on the grounds that the program was engaged in “advocacy,” not teaching.

Despite this setback, Senior went on to achieve lasting cultural impact for at least two other works; he authored a list of “1,000 Good Books,” arguing that one was not prepared to read the truly Great Books without adequate imaginative preparation. His list has become a cherished document, passed from homeschooling parent to homeschooling parent, and has since spread to many classical schools. He also distilled his philosophy into two books, The Death of Christian Culture and The Restoration of Christian Culture. Senior took seriously the claims that the great texts of the Western tradition made about reality and contended that we in modernity have lost touch with the real. The greatest educational need the rising generation has is to discover wonder through experiencing beauty.

The Integrated Humanities Program had a significant impact on dozens of students, who brought Senior’s methods to future institutions. The Integrated Humanities Program had a significant impact on dozens of students; those students then brought Senior’s methods to a variety of future institutions. As Francis Bethel details in John Senior and the Restoration of Realism, several of Senior’s students formed the Benedictine monastery Our Lady of Clear Creek in Hulbert, Oklahoma. But perhaps the greatest impact of the IHP is the way it affected significant college institutions and remains a model for new institutions to consider.

College is about experiencing a higher culture and transmitting that culture to the next generation. Hillsdale College was, in many ways, a standard small liberal-arts college up through the 1980s. At one point, much to the chagrin of current leadership, it may have made a list of Playboy’s best party schools in the Midwest. But that all changed by the early 2000s. President Larry Arnn deserves much credit for his public leadership from 2001 to the present, but two prior changes had already occurred. First, Hillsdale lost a fight with the Department of Education—if they did not report demographic data, they could not receive federal funds. The college had to develop new bases of funding. But, secondly, and more importantly, Dr. David Whalen came to Hillsdale first as a professor and eventually as provost of the college. While Dr. Arnn helped build the endowment and oversaw all hires, Dr. Whalen cultivated a return to true liberal education at the heart of faculty culture.

Whalen was himself a product of Senior’s IHP program. By the time I arrived at Hillsdale in the fall of 2007, student and faculty culture revolved around an interdisciplinary core. All students took Great Books I and II, Western Heritage, American Heritage, and a variety of other courses. Whalen’s particular stamp lies in the rejection of job training as part of the collegiate task. College is not about preparing students for the workplace: It is instead about experiencing a higher culture, transmitting that culture to the next generation, and, in so doing, spreading that culture through graduates. Whalen received much of his training from Senior, and, inasmuch as Senior shaped Whalen, he shaped Hillsdale College’s trajectory.

Wyoming Catholic College, founded in 2005, looks directly at John Senior as a key influence. One of the college’s three founders, Dr. Robert Carlson, studied under Senior and brought Senior’s philosophy of wonder, nature, and reality into Wyoming Catholic’s vision statement, Born in Wonder, Brought to Wisdom. Senior’s motto for the IHP, Nascantur in Admiratione, “Let them be born in wonder,” governed the IHP’s emphasis on stargazing, travel, and poetry recitation. Wonder was something to be experienced, not merely described. Man was made to experience beauty. Senior built a program that placed students in proximity to beauty and invited them to partake of it. At Wyoming Catholic, that philosophy led first to the location of the college within the state, nestled between rivers, mountains, and plains. All students participate in risky, adventurous hikes; their college experience begins with several weeks in the Wyoming wilderness. Rigorous liberal-arts classrooms are complemented with weekend excursions hiking, climbing, riding, and skiing. Wyoming Catholic proclaims that nature is the first book through which God communicates, and students must experience it fully.

In North Carolina, Thales College is looking to the IHP for inspiration in developing a new approach to teaching humanities classes. Following a quarter system, students will take five humanities courses that read history, literature, and philosophy texts from a given chronological period (ancient, late antiquity, medieval, modern Europe, or American). Each class will require students to memorize and recite poetry from the time period, embedding an experience of beauty within exposure to the greatest texts of Western civilization. On the Western end of North Carolina, Canongate Catholic High School incorporates Senior’s views on music into their pedagogy: “In between classes, on feast days, and in moments of pause from study, the air would fill with music. Students learned ballads born long ago in Ireland and Scotland, ‘Wild Mountain Thyme’ and ‘Loch Lomond’ and ‘Tell Me Ma’.” Canongate’s dedication to music has grown into the Kingfisher Folk Festival. Senior’s influence is alive and well in North Carolina.

While a variety of similar colleges could be named (among them New Saint Andrews College and Thomas Aquinas College), perhaps a more fruitful third fruit from Senior can be found in James S. Taylor’s book, Poetic Knowledge: The Recovery of Education. Taylor studied under Senior in the IHP, and in his dissertation he distilled Senior’s approach into a method that has since inspired hundreds of classical Christian educators. In 2006, Taylor explained the “poetic mode” of knowledge as

a natural, spontaneous way of knowing reality and of experiencing it directly or vicariously as via the memory and imagination. It is a real mode of knowledge dramatized by Homer, considered essential by Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and cited by St. Thomas Aquinas in a commentary on the Sentences, as poetica scientia. It is distinct, but not separate, from three other modes of knowledge identified in the history [of] Western philosophy as the metaphysical, the scientific, and the rhetorical. These distinctions were first brought to my attention in their hierarchical considerations by the late American classics professor, my dear friend and teacher, John Senior.

Senior’s attempt to bring students into this mode of knowledge highlights the possibility of education at all levels: Teachers who understand this way of life bring their students into it. Through modelling poetic knowledge, teachers enculturate their students into the tradition. The academic lineage continues: Senior mentored Taylor, who in turn oversaw Dr. Matthew Bianco’s doctoral dissertation. Bianco is now the chief operating officer of the North Carolina-based CiRCE Institute and oversees CiRCE’s teacher-apprenticeship program.

Aristotle told us years ago that “man is by nature a creature designed to know.” Students want to learn; they want to do hard things. This tradition itself is beautiful, perplexing, wonderful, inviting. Rather than starting new professional majors (e.g., a BS in AI-Prompt Engineering), it’s time to look ad fontes. Let them be born in wonder; let hiring committees bring in faculty who are entranced with the beauty of their subjects and who long to inspire students to see that beauty. Programs following Senior’s example are bursting with applicants. When colleges recover their telos, they will once again find students who long to learn.

Josh Herring is professor of classical education and humanities at Thales College.