Founded in 1998, Harrison Middleton University, a nonprofit graduate institution that specializes in distance learning, offers graduate degrees in the humanities focusing on the interplay of essential ideas and thinkers across history, the study of ancient and modern classics, and the methods of inquiry-based discussion.
In designing programs of study, students at Harrison Middleton University use primary sources drawn from leading academic publishers, including Britannica (Great Books of the Western World), Oxford University Press, Penguin Classics, and W.W. Norton & Company.
Classic authors and their books invite students to take part in an ongoing cultural conversation that communicates and advances humanistic values and beliefs. This intellectual and creative activity—a chorus of voices and words calling to each other across time—is sometimes referred to as the “Great Conversation,” an expression used to describe a continuum of thinkers and ideas that began in ancient civilizations. Entering this conversation is to experience the dialectical nature of a cultural tradition as made manifest in its writing, an ongoing discourse where thinkers respond to previous ideas and either discredit or build upon those ideas to create new and more complex concepts or themes.