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Online Doctorate of Philosophy in Humanities - Faulkner University

Faulkner University

A Christian University

Doctor of Philosophy in Humanities

Faulkner University’s Honors College offers a fully online Doctor of Philosophy for professionals hoping to enrich their higher education experience.

Program Objectives

The fully online Doctor of Philosophy provides an academic path to a career in Christian education and offers a challenging opportunity to expand your mind and experiences through a worldly perspective. Diverse students bring new perspectives to program coursework, helping to facilitate engaging and challenging discussions.

Program Design

Rooted in the Great Tradition of the Western World, the curriculum for the fully online Doctor of Philosophy program follows teachings from the Great Books of the Western Tradition to facilitate intellectual and spiritual engagement from students. Faulkner’s instructors are thought leaders who have proven credentials in the classroom, society and their field of research. Their Christian interpretation of philosophical studies and ideas help to facilitate collaborative and engaging discussion threads and conference calls.

The program includes:

• A fully online platform
• A foundation course that examines the history and philosophy of humane learning.
• Seven core courses providing an in-depth look at complex ideas and thoughts.
• Three independent tutorials focused in your area of interest, including an author, idea(s), problem, theme, specific topic or historical era.
• Two dissertation courses that are the pinnacle of this academic program.
• Two interdisciplinary seminar courses.

The PhD program typically takes three to five years to complete, depending on students’ status (full-time or part-time) and the time taken to complete the dissertation.

Up to six hours of post-master’s coursework may be transferred pending the director’s approval.

Degree Plan

Admission Requirements

Offering schedule.

Prospective students who wish to enroll in the Doctor of Philosophy program must meet the following admission requirements:

• A completed graduate application
• A master’s degree from a regionally accredited institution. You must provide transcripts from all institutions attended.
• A minimum cumulative GPA of 3.25 on a 4.0 scale.
• Acceptable graduate test score on graduate admissions exams, including the GRE (a combined verbal and quantitative score of 297 or above) or MAT (400 or above) taken within the last 5 years. This requirement may be waived for students holding master’s degrees in related fields.
• Three letters of recommendation  with specific comments regarding the applicant’s academic work, professional experience and ability to successfully complete graduate study. These letters are typically from the applicant’s previous instructors or supervisory personnel.
• A statement of personal goals that identifies how the Doctor of Philosophy program will contribute to those goals (400-500 words).
• A scholarly postgraduate writing sample
• Approval by the director of the Doctor of Philosophy program.
• Submit a completed  online application.
• Complete and print the  Official Transcript Request   form and submit it to all previously attended schools with the appropriate fee.
• Send all additional items via mail to your enrollment counselor.
• FNA 8317 Examining Fine Arts: Great Ideas Readings
• HU 7311 Introduction to Humane Letters and Learning
• HU 8326 Understanding Humane Letters: Great Ideas, Authors, and Writings
• HY 8315 Historical Investigations: Great Ideas, Authors, and Writings
• IDS 7301 Scholarly Inquiry and Writing in the Humanities
• IDS 7310 Constitution and American Civic Identity
• IDS 7310/8310 Religion and Culture
• IDS 7310/8310 Religious Humanism
• IDS 7310/8310 Justice
• IDS 8310 Community and Culture
• LIT 7324 Literary Analysis: Great Ideas, Authors, and Writings
• PHL 7313 Great Ideas Readings: Philosophical Inquiries
• SSC 7319 Great Ideas Readings: Reflection on Social Scientific Thought
• NMS 8328 Mathematical Scientific Reasoning: Great Ideas and Readings

Tuition and Fees

2024 - 2025 Financial Information

Summer  – Course offerings vary.

A minimum of three seminar courses are offered each summer.These seminars are scheduled in part based on student demand.  Contact program director for offerings in a specific term.

Note:  All live seminar meetings occur 7:30–9:00 pm (CT) via Google hangout video call.

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What’s So Great About Great-Books Courses?

Roosevelt Montás was born in a rural village in the Dominican Republic and immigrated to the United States when he was eleven years old. He attended public schools in Queens, where he took classes in English as a second language, then entered Columbia College through a government program for low-income students. After getting his B.A., he was admitted to Columbia’s Ph.D. program in English and Comparative Literature when a dean got the department to reconsider his application, which had been rejected. He received a Ph.D. in 2004 and has been teaching at Columbia ever since, now as a senior lecturer, a renewable but untenured appointment. He is forty-eight.

Arnold Weinstein is eighty-one. Although he was an indifferent student in high school, he was admitted to Princeton, spent his junior year in Paris, an experience that fired an interest in literature, and received a Ph.D. from Harvard in 1968. He was hired by Brown, was tenured in 1973, and is today the Richard and Edna Salomon Distinguished Professor of Comparative Literature. These two men started on very different life paths and ended up writing the same book.

They are even being published by the same university press, Princeton. Montás’s is called “ Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation ”; Weinstein’s is “ The Lives of Literature: Reading, Teaching, Knowing .” The genre, a common one for academics writing non-scholarly books, is a combination of memoir (some family history, career anecdotes), criticism (readings of selected texts to illustrate convictions of the author’s), and polemic against trends the author disapproves of. The polemic can sometimes take the form of “It’s all gone to hell.” Montás’s and Weinstein’s books fall into the “It’s all gone to hell” category.

Both men teach what are called—unfortunately but inescapably—“great books” courses. Since Weinstein works at a college that has no requirements outside the major, his courses are departmental offerings, but the syllabi seem to be composed largely of books by well-known Western writers, from Sophocles to Toni Morrison. At Columbia, undergraduates must complete two years of non-departmental great-books courses: Masterpieces of Western Literature and Philosophy, for first-year students, and Introduction to Contemporary Civilization in the West, for sophomores. These courses, among others, known as “the Core,” originated around the time of the First World War and have been required since 1947. Montás not only teaches in the Core; he served for ten years as the director of the Center for the Core Curriculum.

Although Montás and Weinstein are highly successful academics at two leading universities, where they are, no doubt, popular teachers, they feel alienated from and, to some extent, disrespected by the higher-education system. As they see it, they are doing God’s work. Their humanities colleagues are careerists who have lost sight of what education is about, and their institutions are in service to Mammon and Big Tech.

It will probably not improve their spirits to point out that professors have been making the same complaints ever since the American research university came into being, in the late nineteenth century. “Rescuing Socrates” and “The Lives of Literature” can be placed on a long shelf that contains books such as Hiram Corson’s “The Aims of Literary Study” (1894), Irving Babbitt’s “Literature and the American College” (1908), Robert Maynard Hutchins’s “ The Higher Learning in America ” (1936), Allan Bloom’s “ The Closing of the American Mind ” (1987), William Deresiewicz’s “ Excellent Sheep ” (2014), and dozens of other impassioned and sometimes eloquent works explaining that higher education has lost its soul. It’s a song that never ends.

So, although Montás and Weinstein seem to think that things went wrong recently, things (from the point of view they represent) were wrong from the start. The conflict these professors are experiencing between their educational ideals and the priorities of their institutions is baked into the system.

That conflict is essentially a dispute over the purpose of college. How did the great books get caught up in it? In the old college system, the entire curriculum was prescribed, and there were lists of books that every student was supposed to study—a canon. The canon was the curriculum. In the modern university, students elect their courses and choose their majors. That is the system the great books were designed for use in. The great books are outside the regular curriculum.

The idea of the great books emerged at the same time as the modern university. It was promoted by works like Noah Porter’s “Books and Reading: Or What Books Shall I Read and How Shall I Read Them?” (1877) and projects like Charles William Eliot’s fifty-volume Harvard Classics (1909-10). (Porter was president of Yale; Eliot was president of Harvard.) British counterparts included Sir John Lubbock’s “One Hundred Best Books” (1895) and Frederic Farrar’s “Great Books” (1898). None of these was intended for students or scholars. They were for adults who wanted to know what to read for edification and enlightenment, or who wanted to acquire some cultural capital.

The idea made its way into universities after 1900 as part of a backlash against the research model, led by proponents of what was called “liberal culture.” These were professors, mainly in the humanities, who deplored the university’s new emphasis on science, specialization, and expertise. For the key to the concept of the great books is that you do not need any special training to read them.

In a great-books course of the kind that Montás and Weinstein teach, undergraduates read primary texts, then meet in a classroom to share their responses with their peers. Discussion is led by an instructor, but the instructor’s job is not to give the students a more informed understanding of the texts, or to train them in methods of interpretation, which is what would happen in a typical literature- or philosophy-department course. The instructor’s job is to help the students relate the texts to their own lives. For people like Montás and Weinstein, it is also to personify what a life shaped by reading books like these can be. “The teacher models the still living power of the book,” as Weinstein puts it.

You can see the problem. Universities like Brown and Columbia make big investments in training scholars and researchers in their doctoral programs, and then, after they are credentialled and hired as professors, supporting their work with office and laboratory space, libraries, computers and related technology, research budgets, conference and travel funds, sabbaticals, and so on. Why should an English professor who got his degree with a dissertation on the American Transcendentalists (as Montás did), and who doesn’t read Italian or know anything about medieval Christianity, teach Dante (in a week!), when you have a whole department of Italian-literature scholars on your faculty? What qualifies a man like Arnold Weinstein, who has spent his entire adult life in the literature departments of Ivy League universities, to guide eighteen-year-olds in ruminations on the state of their souls and the nature of the good life?

It’s not an accident or a misfortune that great-books pedagogy is an antibody in the “knowledge factory” of the research university, in other words. It was intended as an antibody. The disciplinary structure of the modern university came first; the great-books courses came after. As Montás says, “The practice of liberal education, especially in the context of a research university, is pointedly countercultural.”

Montás is using the term “liberal education” mistakenly. Virtually every course at an élite school like Columbia, from poetry to physics, is part of a liberal education. “Liberal” just means free and disinterested. It means that inquiry is pursued without fear or favor, regardless of the outcome and whatever the field of study. Universities exist to protect that freedom. But Montás is right about the countercultural part. Great-books courses tend to be taught against the grain of academic disciplinary paradigms.

This has obvious educational value. Many students who take a great-books-type course enjoy encountering famous texts and seeing that the questions they raise are often relevant to their other coursework. And some students experience a kind of intellectual awakening, which can be inspiring and even transformational. For students who are motivated—and motivation is half of learning—these courses really work. They are happy to read Dante in translation and without a scholarly apparatus, because they want to get a sense of what Dante is all about, and they know that if they don’t get it in college they are unlikely to get it anywhere else.

Undergraduate teachers, whatever their training, can play a role as a transitional parent figure, someone students can talk to who is not privy to their personal or social lives, someone who will let them have the keys to the car no questions asked. And students profit from learning how universities operate and arguing about what college is for. It opens up the experience for them, gives the system some transparency and the students some agency.

So why the tsuris? At this point, great-books-type courses—that is, courses where the focus is on primary texts and student relatability rather than on scholarly literature and disciplinary training—are part of the higher-education landscape. Few colleges require them, but many colleges happily offer them. The quarrel between generalist and specialist—or, as it is sometimes framed down in the trenches, between dilettante and pedant—is more than a hundred years old and it would seem that this is not a quarrel that one side has to win. Montás and Weinstein, however, think that the conflict is existential, and that the future of the academic humanities is at stake. Are they right?

Between 2012 and 2019, the number of bachelor’s degrees awarded annually in English fell by twenty-six per cent, in philosophy and religious studies by twenty-five per cent, and in foreign languages and literature by twenty-four per cent. In English, according to the Association of Departments of English, which tracked the numbers through 2016, research universities, like Brown and Columbia, took the biggest hits. More than half reported a drop in degrees of forty per cent or more in just four years.

The trend is national. Some departments have maintained market share, of course, and creative-writing classes seem to be popular everywhere. But, in general, undergraduates have largely stopped taking humanities courses. Only eight per cent of students entering Harvard College this fall report that they intend to major in the arts and humanities, a division that has twenty-one undergraduate programs.

The decline in student interest affects doctoral programs as well, and this fact is crucial, because doctoral programs are the reproductive organs of the entire system. Fewer graduate students are admitted, because the job market for humanities Ph.D.s is contracting. More important, no one is sure how to teach the students who do get in. If courses in the traditional subfields of literary studies (medieval poetry, early-modern drama, the eighteenth-century novel, and so on) are not attracting undergraduates, shouldn’t new Ph.D.s be trained differently? If so, given that faculties are mostly trained in the traditional subfields themselves, who is going to do it?

And, even if you could completely redesign doctoral education, it takes at least six years to get a Ph.D. in the humanities (the median time is more than nine years) and another six years, minimum, to get tenure. An academic discipline is a big ship to turn around, especially when it is taking on water.

Montás and Weinstein don’t cite these figures. They don’t cite any figures, actually, because even if business were booming it would make no difference to them. But this is the real-world context in which they are publishing their books. This is the moment they have chosen to inform readers that academic humanists are not doing their job. “Liberal education is impaired and imperiled,” Montás reports. “Too often professional practitioners of liberal education—professors and college administrators—have corrupted their activity by subordinating the fundamental goals of education to specialized academic pursuits that only have meaning within their own institutional and career aspirations.” “Corrupted” is a pretty strong word.

What humanists should be teaching, Montás and Weinstein believe, is self-knowledge. To “know thyself” is the proper goal. Art and literature, as Weinstein puts it, “are intended for personal use, not in the self-help sense but as mirrors, as entryways into who we ourselves are or might be.” Montás says, “A teacher in the humanities can give students no greater gift than the revelation of the self as a primary object of lifelong investigation.” You don’t need research to learn this. Research is irrelevant. You just need some great books and a charismatic instructor.

For the advocates of liberal culture a century ago, the false god of literature departments was philology. Today, the false god is “theory.” Montás complains that contemporary theory—he calls it “postmodernism”—subverts the college’s educational mission by calling into question terms like “truth” and “virtue.” A postmodernist, in his definition, is a person who believes that there is no capital-T truth, that “true” is just the compliment those with power pay to their own beliefs. “This unmooring of human reason from the possibility of ultimate truth in effect undermines all of Western metaphysics,” he tells us, “including ethics.” (He blames this all on Friedrich Nietzsche, whom he calls “Satan’s most acute theologian,” which is an amazing thing to say. Nietzsche wanted to free people to embrace life, not to send them to Hell. He didn’t believe in Hell. Or theology.)

Weinstein’s criticism of theory is somewhat less apocalyptic. For him, theory represents a desperate and wrongheaded attempt—he calls it “the humanities’ ‘last stand’ ”—to introduce rigor and objectivity into literary studies. He doesn’t think rigor and objectivity have a place in an undergraduate literature course. “You won’t find very much of them in my classroom,” he assures us. “In my crazier moments I think that rigor may be akin to rigor mortis.”

But questioning the meaning of accepted values has been a major theme in Western thought since Socrates, and “truth” and “virtue” were never exempt. Postmodernism is not a license to shoplift. People who see “truth” and “virtue” as functions of power relations tend to be hyperethical, because they see power disparities everywhere. Postmodernists do not run more red lights than evangelicals do.

And if, as these authors insist, education is about self-knowledge and the nature of the good, what are those things supposed to look like? How do we know them when we get there? What does it mean to be human? What exactly is the good life?

Oh, they can’t say. The whole business is ineffable. We should know better than to expect answers. That’s quant-thinking. “The value of the thing,” Montás explains, about liberal education, “cannot be extracted and delivered apart from the experience of the thing.” Literature’s bottom line, Weinstein says, is that it has no bottom line. It all sounds a lot like “Trust us. We can’t explain it, but we know what we’re doing.”

In the creation of the modern university, science was the big winner. The big loser was not literature. It was religion. The university is a secular institution, and scientific research—more broadly, the production of new knowledge—is what it was designed for. All the academic disciplines were organized with this end in view. Philology prevailed in literature departments because philology was scientific. It represented a research agenda that could produce replicable results. Weinstein is not wrong to think that critical theory has played the same role. It does aim to add rigor to literary analysis.

For Montás and Weinstein, though, science is the enemy of ethical insight and self-knowledge. Science instrumentalizes, it quantifies, it reduces life to elements that are, well, effable. Weinstein can see that students might think that science courses are useful for a successful career, but he thinks that “success” is just another false idol. He writes, “One has read a great deal about ‘quants’ being gobbled up by investment firms, hired on the strength of their mathematical prowess, hence likely to add to bottom lines. What actually does a bottom line mean? Is anyone asking about judgment? Does any university or graduate school transcript even whisper anything about judgment? Values? Priorities? Ethics?”

Weinstein won’t even call what students learn in science courses “knowledge.” He calls it “information,” which he thinks has nothing to do with how one ought to live. “Life is more than reason or data,” he tells us, “and literature schools us in a different set of affairs, the affairs of heart and soul that have little truck with information as such.”

For Montás, the trouble with science is that it answers the important questions—Who am I? How shall I live?—in “purely materialistic terms.” He blames this on a writer who died in 1650, René Descartes. “Today, the heirs to Descartes’s project are perhaps most visible in Silicon Valley,” Montás says, “but the ethic that informs his approach is pervasive in the broader culture, including the culture of the university.”

What did Descartes write that set us on the road to Facebook? He wrote that scientific knowledge can lead to medical discoveries that improve health and prolong life. Montás calls this proposition “Faustian.” He says that it implies that there is “no higher value than the subsistence and satisfaction of the self,” and that this is what college students are being taught today.

Humanists cannot win a war against science. They should not be fighting a war against science. They should be defending their role in the knowledge business, not standing aloof in the name of unspecified and unspecifiable higher things. They need to connect with disciplines outside the humanities, to get out of their silos.

Art and literature have cognitive value. They are records of the ways human beings have made sense of experience. They tell us something about the world. But they are not privileged records. A class in social psychology can be as revelatory and inspiring as a class on the novel. The idea that students develop a greater capacity for empathy by reading books in literature classes about people who never existed than they can by taking classes in fields that study actual human behavior does not make a lot of sense.

Knowledge is a tool, not a state of being. Universities are in this world, and education is about empowering people to deal with things as they are. Students at places like Brown and Columbia want to make the world a better place, and they can see, as Descartes saw, that science can provide tools to do this. If some of those students make a lot of money, who cares?

Isn’t it a little arrogant for humanists like the authors of these books to presume that economics professors and life-science professors and computer-science professors don’t care about their students’ personal development? The humanities do not have a monopoly on moral insight. Reading Weinstein and Montás, you might conclude that English professors, having spent their entire lives reading and discussing works of literature, must be the wisest and most humane people on earth. Take my word for it, we are not. We are not better or worse than anyone else. I have read and taught hundreds of books, including most of the books in the Columbia Core. I teach a great-books course now. I like my job, and I think I understand many things that are important to me much better than I did when I was seventeen. But I don’t think I’m a better person. ♦

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Benedictine College

Great Books Program

The Great Books Program leads students to ponder fundamental questions through the greatest texts from classical antiquity to modernity, from  Homer to Aquinas  and from  Dante to Dostoevsky .

Benedictine College’s Great Books Program was named one of the 25 Best Great Books Programs in America by Best College Reviews.

Joining Great Books

Want a taste of the program? Try the Great Books interest track this summer during our Catholic academic youth camp, BCYC Immersion.

The Great Books Program at Benedictine College is an option for students who want to fulfill general education requirements (which all students must take) in a more traditional Liberal Arts format. Great Books scholars at Benedictine College study the foundational works of Western thought. The courses are open to all students, whatever major, allowing anyone who wants to encounter history’s great minds in a seminar environment the ability to enroll.

Because the Liberal Arts constitute one of the four pillars of a Benedictine education, many courses at Benedictine College qualify as Great Books courses. Our specific Great Books courses follow a chronological sequence which follows over four semesters the historical development of human thought and imagination in history: The Ancient World, The Middle Ages, The Renaissance and The Moderns. (To allow students greater flexibility of schedule, it is occasionally permitted that the courses be taken in a different order.)

The Printed Page and Beyond

Great Books scholars will also be encouraged to participate in Benedictine College’s “Faith and Reason” three-semester sequence which systematically examines the great works in philosophy and theology.

To encourage camaraderie among Great Books scholars, Benedictine College will provide opportunities for the scholars to meet and further investigate literature and the arts, including visits to such places of cultural and intellectual interest as the Nelson-Atkins Museum and the Kauffman Center for the Performing Arts. On these visits, students will be accompanied by professors so that the classroom discussion environment can embrace not only great books, but also great works of music, art and theatre.

Cicero made the argument for Great Books in his day when he said:

“Books are full of such precepts, and all the sayings of philosophers, and all antiquity is full of precedents teaching the same lesson; but all these things would lie buried in darkness, if the light of literature and learning were not applied to them. How many images of the bravest men, carefully elaborated, have both the Greek and Latin writers bequeathed to us, not merely for us to look at and gaze upon, but also for our imitation!” ( Pro Archia Poetā , 14)

From Homer to Dante, from Plato to Dostoevsky, from Augustine to Sartre, the Great Books offer students the opportunity to encounter the great minds that shaped the world we live in. By entering the conversation with great thinkers about the fundamental problems facing mankind, Great Books students will be able thoughtfully to consider perennial truths, timelessly expressed, embodied in the classics of our civilization.

Above all, a Great Books education results in a graduate who is passionate about seeking the truth and is rooted in the Western tradition, but also enriched in many other ways. Reading the Great Books and discussing them in seminars give students the skills in thinking critically, writing clearly and pursuing the truth together with others that employers and graduate schools highly value and that serve students well in all walks of life.

Edward Mulholland, Ph.D. Associate Professor and Sheridan Chair of Classics Contact by Email 913.360.7635

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Basic Program of Liberal Education

Why the Great Books?

Great Books are historically significant texts that shaped or defined entire cultures or movements—whether for the better or the worse.

These books wrestle with enduring themes of cultures, societies, emotions, and the human condition. Many of these moral, social, and political questions are as relevant today and strikingly applicable to contemporary issues.

The Basic Program engages directly with primary texts as a way to encounter the meaning of these ideas in their own time, while also inviting students to reflect on their relevance to our present day.

What is a “Great Book”? A book that has been impactful, that is well written, and that is in many ways timeless. We still read Plato because we are still human beings dealing with the fundamental ideas of humanity like happiness, virtue, and justice, and even though society has changed, these fundamental topics have not. Zoë Eisenman, Director of Academics and Basic Program instructor

We believe that study of the Great Books offers a valuable foundation for intellectual inquiry. By letting voices other than our own influence, inspire, and inform our perspective, we can look anew at the world from a variety of viewpoints.

Questions on the Registration Process?

If you have questions about the course registration process, click here .

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