Endowed by Winton and Carolyn Blount and assisted by many other donors, the Blount Scholars Program is a selective, four-year, living and learning community featuring small, seminar-style classes, intensive interaction with faculty, and an integrated, interdisciplinary curriculum leading to a minor. Overall program enrollment is approximately 350 students. Blount is open to all incoming first-year students regardless of academic interests or major. In its courses and social activities, the program emphasizes the connectedness of knowledge and the importance of faculty-student learning partnerships.
Courses
Experiences to extend and complement the Blount Scholars Program foundation courses. May be repeated once for credit.
Culture and nature are not merely the spaces we inhabit, they are the principal objects of human reflection and interpretation, or should be. This year-long course uses a survey of influential texts in philosophy, science, religion, political theory, and literature produced in the West over three millennia to provide students with an introductory practicum in the interpretation of culture and nature. Within this framework, more specific concepts to be explored will include the nature of society, the nature of the individual, the nature of government and justice as regulatory mechanisms between the two, the nature of power in its various forms, the concept of nature itself, and America as a social experiment in which these concepts are continually interpreted and reinterpreted.