As a Whitman student, you’ll live and learn on a campus which is uniquely fertile ground for ideas to grow. This is a place that’s about breakthrough thinking and new intellectual possibilities. And you’ll find no better example of our community’s commitment to a life of the mind than our innovative “Core” class.

How would you describe an education that requires every first-year student, regardless of their major, to engage with texts by Homer, Sappho, Plato, Shakespeare, Darwin, Nietzsche, and Toni Morrison, among others? The “Core” class, a two-semester course requirement for Whitman freshmen called Antiquity and Modernity, is a rigorous, interdisciplinary intellectual exploration of Western philosophy, religion, history, and literature that provides the critical thinking and communication skills and the broad intellectual foundation students need to prepare for meaningful lives.

How would you describe a curriculum that requires all students of all majors to complete comprehensive oral examinations before they graduate? To ensure the same level of academic rigor for undergraduate education that is traditionally reserved for graduate education, Whitman became the first college in the nation, nearly a century ago, to require “comps.”

How would you describe a campus that grinds to a halt once every year to celebrate student scholarship, research, and creativity? Whitman’s Undergraduate Conference, one of the few of its kind in the nation, is an annual tradition where students present a whole year’s worth of original research, scholarship, art, and other intellectual activity to the entire campus community.

“Intellectual centripety.” It’s the phrase Dana Burgess, department chair and professor of classics, often uses to describe the unique combination of place, programs, and people that defines the Whitman experience. “This is an intellectual community above all else,” he says, “a community that seeks its center in intellectual pursuits, that inspires deep and meaningful connections — between students and other students, between students and faculty and visiting scholars, between people and ideas and the world, and between the past, present, and the future.

“Whether it’s Core, the Classics program, or the Whitman experience in general, what we focus on is encouraging those kinds of connections,” Professor Burgess concludes. “This is the kind of college where everyone and everything — a unique location, excellent facilities, a rigorous curriculum, an active faculty, talented students — is centered on supporting a life of the mind.”