Admission requirements
Admission to The College Project is by application only. When applying please provide the following:
A brief motivation in which you briefly (max 1 page 1.5 spaced) explain your interest in the course, how it fits into your study plan, etc.
Your transcript (print screen from Usis is fine)
Submit all documents via email to: b.m.zicha@luc.leidenuniv.nl; the deadline to do so is Thursday 1 January 2026, 23:59.
Description
Citizens are not born—they must be formed. Liberal education, from its earliest articulations, was dedicated to exactly this: forming free people capable of shaping their world. If we want to take citizenship education seriously, we must reckon with the tradition responsible for its very existence as an idea.
We may stand at an inflection point now. The ground is shifting beneath higher education—technologically, economically, culturally—and the questions feel urgent: What is education for? What kind of people should it form? What does a thriving society actually need from its institutions of learning?
These questions feel new. They are not.
Every era of profound transformation has forced a reckoning with education. The ancient Greeks debated whether learning should cultivate the citizen or the professional. Rome reimagined these ideals for empire. Christianity asked what it meant to educate a soul. The Renaissance recovered classical learning; the Enlightenment demanded reason over authority; the Industrial Revolution subordinated education to productivity. The twentieth century—shattered by war, reshaped by democracy—asked whether liberal learning could build a more humane world. And then came the post-Cold War turn: the triumph of the labor market, the rise of metrics and outcomes, the reduction of education to human capital investment. This is the water we swim in now.
But the crises of our moment—climate change, democratic erosion, technological disruption, polarization—seem to demand exactly what this reduction has stripped away: the capacity for integrative thinking, ethical reasoning, civic imagination, and the ability to act wisely under uncertainty. If liberal education was ever actually for something, we need to know what that something was—and whether any of it still speaks to what we face now.
This course invites you into that inquiry—indeed, into the conversation about the great conversation, if we take from Oakeshott the notion that education is initiation into the dialogue that constitutes civilization itself.
Using Bruce Kimball's anthology The Liberal Arts Tradition as our foundation, we will trace liberal education from ancient Athens to the present. We will read the original voices—Isocrates and Cicero, Augustine and Newman, Dewey and Nussbaum—and examine how each generation inherited, contested, and transformed what it meant to be liberally educated. We will study these texts not as museum pieces but as living arguments.
But this is not a course of passive reception. It is a project.
Together, we will create a podcast exploring the liberal arts tradition and the distinctive mission of University College in the Netherlands. This is an act of inquiry and communication—a chance to articulate, for ourselves and for the world beyond our walls, what we are doing here and why it matters. We will grapple publicly with the question that organizes everything: Can liberal arts save the world? And if so—how?
Understanding earlier inflection points is not antiquarian curiosity; it is preparation. It is the cultivation of perspective, judgment, and imagination we will need to navigate what comes next.
This is also the first iteration of the course—an experiment. You are not enrolling in a finished curriculum; you are helping to build something. There will be room for co-creation, for unexpected turns, for shaping the project as we discover together what this inquiry demands.
If you are ready for serious reading, honest reflection, and the adventure of making something that speaks beyond the classroom—join us.
Course Objectives
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
Historical & Conceptual Understanding
Trace the major transformations in liberal education from classical antiquity to the present, identifying key tensions (citizen vs. professional, reason vs. authority, formation vs. utility) that recur across eras—and framing these, when appropriate, in the context of larger structural changes in higher education.
Analyze primary texts in the liberal arts tradition, situating authors within their historical contexts while extracting arguments relevant to contemporary debates.
Explain how shifting social, political, and economic conditions have reshaped educational purposes at critical inflection points.
Critical Reflection
Articulate and defend a reasoned position on the relationship between higher education, citizenship, and the capacity to address global challenges—drawing on historical sources and contemporary evidence.
Critically examine their own educational experience in light of the traditions studied, connecting abstract debates to lived practice.
Communication & Public Scholarship
Translate complex intellectual material into accessible, engaging audio content for a general audience.
Collaborate effectively on a sustained creative project, navigating the challenges of shared production.
Disposition & Orientation
Apply the core practices of liberal arts inquiry—close reading, seminar-based deliberation, and historical contextualization—to approach uncertainty and institutional change with perspective rather than presentism or fatalism.
Take ownership of their own education as an ongoing project rather than a credential to be acquired.
Timetable
Timetables for courses offered at Leiden University College in 2025-2026 will be published on this page of the e-Prospectus.
Mode of instruction
This class is aimed to be a reflective, reading-intensive, conversation- and project-driven class. Sessions not dedicated to project work or introductory material will take the form of seminars around our readings. Meetings outside of class for group work, podcast-related research and field trips, and reading groups should be expected.
Assessment Method
15% Participation
35% Reflective Assignments on Readings (5% chunks)
35% Podcast Group Project (20% Final Project, 15% Process)
15% Final Reflective Oral Evaluation OR End-of-Year Project Symposium (TBD)
Reading list
Required:
Kimball, Bruce A. The Liberal Arts Tradition: A Documentary History. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2010.
Additional readings TBD.
Registration
Courses offered at Leiden University College (LUC) are usually only open to LUC students and LUC exchange students. Leiden University students who participate in one of the university’s Honours tracks or programmes may register for one LUC course, if availability permits. Registration is coordinated by the Education Coordinator, course.administration@luc.leidenuniv.nl.
Contact
Dr. Brandon Zicha, b.m.zicha@luc.leidenuniv.nl
Remarks
This is the first iteration of this course. Students will participate in co-creating elements of the curriculum and the podcast project.