Departments & Programs
Endless conversation
It's not just talk. It's "an endless unrehearsed intellectual adventure," the British philosopher Michael Oakeshott told a crowd at the college in 1975 during a week-long visit that left him delighted and impressed by the faculty, the students, and the magnificent setting.
It's a conversation, Oakeshott said, "in which, in imagination, we enter into a variety of modes of understanding the world and ourselves." Here, he saw unlimited opportunities to learn and to reflect on learning. This is the tradition you'll draw upon as you navigate this place of learning, block by block.
Spend an intense three and a half weeks reading Shakespeare, then another pondering the social value of video games, then perhaps another examining RNA with a professor who shares the joy of a science-glimpse into what makes us human. You'll write, you'll read, you'll paint or sing or calculate or contemplate. You'll take a deep breath and at some point it will all make sense. You're learning to understand, and you know it's a lifelong conversation.
Explore our academic departments and programs below:
- Anthropology
- Art
- Asian Studies
- Biology
- Chemistry & Biochemistry
- Classics
- Comparative Literature
- Department of Chinese, German, Italian, Japanese and Russian Studies
- Economics & Business
- Education
- English Department
- Environmental Studies and Science
- Feminist & Gender Studies
- Film and Media Studies
- French
- Geology
- German Studies
- History
- Human Biology and Kinesiology
- Italian Program
- Japanese Program & Chinese Program
- Mathematics & Computer Science
- Molecular Biology
- Music
- Neuroscience
- Organismal Biology & Ecology
- Philosophy
- Physics
- Political Science
- Psychology
- Race, Ethnicity, and Migration Studies
- Religion
- Russian & Eurasian Studies
- Sociology
- Southwest Studies
- Spanish & Portuguese
- Theatre and Dance