Undergraduate Program (B.A.)
Not a single wasted term
Two years of disciplined intellectual formation. Two years of focused mastery and consequential work, culminating in something you have built and defended.
Intellectual Foundations
All students take a core sequence covering the Great Books and the foundations of Western civilization—history, politics, economics, science, math, technology, and the American experiment.
Specialization
Choose your focus area. Complete advanced coursework. Pursue electives and specialized sequences in economics, literature, computer programming, or law. Take small seminars with distinguished professors.
The Polaris Project
A four-year journey to launch a startup, pursue scholarly research, or complete a hands-on apprenticeship. Present what you've built by graduation.
Bachelor Of Arts In Liberal Studies
the core
Intellectual Foundations
Every student takes the same 15 courses together, building a shared foundation in the ideas, history, and methods that shaped the West.
Civilization and Its Crises
How regimes rise and fall. What holds a civilization together. What threatens human flourishing. What makes the West distinctive.
The American Experiment
From ancient debates on justice and regime to the founding of the United States. Why America succeeded. Why communists and fascists opposed it.
Religion and Modernity
Faith, reason, and science. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Whether modernity is compatible with religion.
Math, Data, and The Foundations Of Science
Quantitative reasoning. Modeling problems. Reasoning with uncertainty. Separating signal from noise. How technology works and how it can be abused.
Economics, Incentives, and Institutions
How incentives and institutions shape human behavior.
Close Reading and Good Writing
You learn to write clear English without dependence on AI, argue honestly, and read difficult texts with care.
specialization
Mastery and Building
Choose one of three programs—Humanities, Social Science, or Science & Technology—and go deep, building real expertise while advancing a major project of your own.
Humanities
For students drawn to philosophy, religion, literature, and the arts. You study the development of Western culture from the ancients to the moderns, with real exposure to at least one non-Western civilization. You learn how ideas, stories, and works of art were shaped by great human genius—and how they continue to shape politics, morality, and everyday life today. You won't just read "about" great works; you'll live inside them, wrestle with rival accounts of truth. The result is the rarest skill in modern life: the ability to think clearly about what matters most.
Sample Syllabi: EPH 1500: History, Historiography and the Philosophy of History; The Rise and Fall of Ancient Rome
Social Science
You master micro and macroeconomics, data science, and hands-on finance alongside deep study of U.S. institutions, elections, corporations, and law—with historical grounding that's more empirical, more modern, and more American than the core. Distinguished visiting professors from courts, think tanks, and government bring the real world into the classroom.
Sample Syllabi: Ideological Experiments of the 20th Century; American Experiment
Science and Technology
Built to make you fluent in the mathematical and computational languages of the modern world. You move through a rigorous math core—calculus, differential equations, probability, statistics, linear algebra, optimization—then into programming, data structures, machine learning, and statistical learning, alongside a serious physics sequence with electives in AI and robotics. This is real technical training tied directly to projects and UATX's industry partnerships.
Sample Syllabi: Bioinformatics Algorithms; Mathematics of Machine Learning
North Star
The Polaris Project
Polaris is a four-year project where students take on a real problem and build something around it. Starting first year, they work with mentors, test ideas in the world, and push their project further as their skills sharpen. Every UATX graduate leaves with proof of what they can do.
Define a problem
Students find a problem and shape a project around it.
Build and Test
Students start building early and keep refining, getting feedback from mentors, peers, and real users who challenge them to take it further.
Deliver Something Real
By graduation, they will have produced a serious piece of work — whether a startup, a prototype, a research contribution, or a creative production.
What Sets Us Apart
What Makes This Different
Shared Intellectual Core
Everyone takes the same 15 foundational courses. Conversations go deep, fast. You already share a canon: Plato, Tocqueville, the American Founders, the ideological experiments of the 20th century.
High Standards, Clearly Measured
Published President's List (top 5%) and Dean's List (next 10%) every term. Rigorous grading. Handwritten exams. No inflated curves or Al-generated essays.
Integrated Disciplines
Economists read novels. Humanities students learn probability. Science students study political philosophy. Whole thinkers who can discuss machine learning and American politics in the same conversation.
Designed For Builders
No tuition means you're not a customer to be kept happy. You're an investment to be pushed. The curriculum assumes you want to do hard things: start companies, build technologies that strengthen the country, lead institutions, and defend the free civilization that makes all of it possible.
By Graduation, You Will Have
The ability to think, write, and read deeply—plus broad technical expertise; high competence in one academic specialty; and a major project you've actually shipped into the world.
224 Texts Our Students Are Reading
A Patriot’s History of the United States: From Columbus’s Great Discovery to America’s Age of Entitlement, Larry Schweikart and Michael Allen
The Bubble Act, edited by Helen Paul, et al.
The Legal Tender of Paper Money in America, Benjamin Franklin
Electrical Engineering: Principles and Applications, 6th ed, Allan R. Hambley
The Case Against Education: Why the Education System Is a Waste of Time and Money, Bryan Caplan
Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids: Why Being a Great Parent Is Less Work and More Fun Than You Think, Bryan Caplan
Open Borders: The Science and Ethics of Immigration, Bryan Caplan
Build, Baby, Build: The Science and Ethics of Housing Regulation, Bryan Caplan
Learn to Read Greek: Part 2, Andrew Keller and Stephanie Russell
Mosaic Calculus, Danny Kaplan
The Golden Ass, Apuleius
Confessions, Augustine
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha
Dialogue with Trypho, Justin Martyr
On First Principles, Origen
Against Celsus, Origen
Life of Constantine, Eusebius
Perpetua et Felicitas, Tertullian
Against Heresies, Irenaeus
Orations, Athanasius
Life of Anthony, Athanasius
Oration, Gregory of Nazianzus
The Anathematisms of the Emperor Justinian Against Origen, Justinian
Forty Hadith, Al-Nawawī
Ancient Arabian Poetry, Lyall
Hermeneutics: A Very Short Introduction, Jens Zimmermann
The Invisible God, Paul Corby Finney
Byzantine Theology: Historical Trends and Doctrinal Themes, John Meyendorff
Islamic History, Adam Silverstein
A Random Walk Down Wall Street: The Best Investment Guide That Money Can Buy, 13th ed., Burton G. Malkiel
History of the Kings of Britain, Geoffrey of Monmouth
Ecclesiastical History of England, The Venerable Bede
Lais of Marie de France, Marie de France
The Love Letters of Abelard and Heloise, Peter Abelard and Heloise
Proslogion, St. Anselm
Life of St Francis, St. Bonaventure
Vita Nuova, Dante Alighieri
Beowulf, Seamus Heaney
Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas
The Song of Roland and Other Poems of Charlemagne, Simon Gaunt and Karen Pratt
A Concise History of the Crusades, Thomas Madden
The Autumn of the Middle Ages, Johan Huizinga
Paradiso, Dante
The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli
Discourses on Livy, Niccolò Machiavelli
Considerations on the Causes of the Greatness of the Romans and Their Decline, Charles Baron de Montesquieu
The Spirit of the Laws, Charles Baron de Montesquieu
Thoughts on Machiavelli, Leo Strauss
Virtue Politics, James Hankins
Modern Principles of Economics, Tyler Cowen and Alex Tabarrok
Conceptual Physics, Paul Hewitt
Communism: A History, Richard Pipes
The Great Lie, Flagg Taylor
Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
The Cowshed: Memories of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Ji Xianlin
The Nazi Seizure of Power, William Sheridan Allen
A World Beyond Politics, Pierre Manent
The Passing of an Illusion: The Idea of Communism in the Twentieth Century, François Furet
Russia Under Western Eyes: From the Bronze Horseman to the Lenin Mausoleum, Martin Malia
The Gulag Archipelago, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Sixteen Points, Mao Zedong
Doctrine of Fascism, Benito Mussolini
The Nazi Party Platform
Speech (April 12, 1922), Adolf Hitler
Interview with Hitler (1923)
The Nuremberg Trials
Utopianism, Ancient and Modern, Irving Kristol
Introduction to the Cultural Revolution, Jonathan Spence
Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, Hannah Arendt
German Nihilism, Leo Strauss
An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation, David Ricardo
Principles of Political Economy, John Stuart Mill
Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill
Principles of Economics, Carl Menger
Investigations into the Method of the Social Sciences with Special Reference to Economics, Carl Menger
State and Revolution, Vladimir Lenin
The End of Laissez-Faire, John Maynard Keynes
Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Friedrich Engels
Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith
Manifesto of the Communist Party, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels
Of Property, John Locke
The Grumbling Hive: Or Knaves Turned Honest, Bernard Mandeville
The Progress of English Liberty, David Hume
An Essay on the Principle of Population, Thomas Robert Malthus
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth, Ludwig von Mises
Economics and Knowledge, F. A. Hayek
The Use of Knowledge in Society, F. A. Hayek
The Pretence of Knowledge, F. A. Hayek
A Conflict of Visions, Thomas Sowell
The Clash of Economic Ideas, Lawrence White
The Enduring Debate, David Canon and John Coleman
Who Are We?, Samuel Huntington
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville
The Spirit of the Laws, Charles Baron de Montesquieu
A Citizen’s Guide to American Ideology, Morgan Marietta
The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, et al.
U.S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights
Declaration of Independence
Common Sense, Thomas Paine
The Study of Administration, Woodrow Wilson
The Political Parties Have Sorted, Morris P. Fiorina
Polarization and the Political Elite, Todd Washburn
The History and Danger of Administrative Law, Philip Hamburger
Now…This, Neil Postman
The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies, Bryan Caplan
The Irony of Democracy, Thomas Dye and Harmon Zeigler
Political Science and Journalism: Some Thoughts, Marc Ambinder
Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics, Pew Research Center
The War of the World: Twentieth-Century Conflict and the Descent of the West, Niall Ferguson
The Cold War: A New History, John Lewis Gaddis
Balance: The Economics of Great Powers, Glenn Hubbard
Night, Elie Wiesel
The Sinews of Peace, Winston Churchill
We Shall Fight on the Beaches, Winston Churchill
First Inaugural Address, Franklin D. Roosevelt
Radio Address to the Nation on Unemployment Relief, Herbert Hoover
Soviet Constitution, December 5, 1936
Jewel Voice radio broadcast, Emperor Hirohito
Address to Congress, Woodrow Wilson
Extract from Speech, Adolf Hitler
Five-Year Plan, March 18, 1946
Kellogg-Briand Pact
Suicide in the Trenches, Siegfried Sassoon
For the Fallen, Laurence Binyon
Germany’s war aims (September 1914)
Telegrams, Kaiser Wilhelm-Czar Nicholas
Why Do Some Nations Prosper? The Case of North and South Korea, Lucien Ellington and Tawni Hunt Ferrarini
On the Possibility of Progress, Paul M. Romer
Institutions, Technology and Prosperity, Daron Acemoglu
Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle
Politics, Aristotle
The New Oxford Annotated Bible: New Revised Standard Version with the Apocrypha
Complete Works, Plato
How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now, James Kugel
Linear Algebra Done Right, Sheldon Axler
Linear Algebra Done Wrong, Sergei Treil
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Python, Kenneth Reitz and Tanya Schlusser
Moby-Dick, Herman Melville
Meditations on First Philosophy: With Selections from the Objections and Replies, René Descartes
Ethics: Proved in Geometrical Order, Baruch Spinoza
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke
A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward as Science: With Selections from the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant and Gary Carl Hatfield
Leibniz’s Monadology, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz
The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer
Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Phenomenology of Spirit, G. W. F. Hegel
Encyclopaedia Logic, G. W. F. Hegel
Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, F. W. J. Schelling
System of Ethics according to the Principles of the Wissenschaftslehre, Johann Gottlieb Fichte
Six Theosophic Points, Jakob Böhme
The Abyss of Freedom, Slavoj Žižek
What is Enlightenment?, Immanuel Kant
A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Roger Scruton
A History of Philosophy, Frederick Copleston
German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, Frederick Beiser
Thinking through the Wissenschaftslehre, Daniel Breazeale
Fichte’s Ethical Thought, Allen Wood
Idealism as Modernism, Robert Pippin
Descartes: An Intellectual Biography, Stephen Gaukroger
The Flight to Objectivity: Essays on Cartesianism and Culture, Susan Bordo
Locke, Berkeley, Hume: Central Themes, Jonathan Bennett
The Dark Ground of Spirit: Schelling and the Unconscious, Sean J. McGrath
Schelling and Modern European Philosophy, Andrew Bowie
Schelling’s Organic Form of Philosophy: Life as the Schema of Freedom, Bruce Matthews
The Western Esoteric Tradition, Nicolas Goodrick-Clarke
The Complete Essays, Michel de Montaigne
The Major Political Writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Discourse on Inequality, Jean-Jacques Rousseau
Fundamentals of Physics, David Halliday, Robert Resnick, and Jearl Walker
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen
The Best and the Brightest, David Halberstam
The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Seymour Hersh
Pentagon Papers
Never Forget National Humiliation, Zheng Wang
Captives and Companions, Justin Marozzi
Empire of Cotton, Sven Beckert
Deep Roots: How Slavery Still Shapes Southern Politics, Avidit Acharya et al.
The Black Family in Slavery and Freedom, Herbert Gutman
The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, Michelle Alexander
Locked In: The True Causes of Mass Incarceration – and How to Achieve Real Reform, John Pfaff
The Real History of Slavery, Thomas Sowell
The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward Baptist
Slavery and the Wealth of Nations, Adam Smith
Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, Ayn Rand
How the World Became Rich: The Historical Origins of Economic Growth, Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin
A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, Edmund Burke
Critique of the Power of Judgment, Immanuel Kant
Of the Standard of Taste, David Hume
Haikus, Basho
Beauty, Roger Scruton
The Sublime and the Avant Garde, Jean-François Lyotard
U.S. Defense Policy toward Israel: A Cold War History, Daniel Samet
Stories of Your Life and Others, Ted Chiang
The Technological Society, Jacques Ellul
The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays, Martin Heidegger
The Pentagon’s Brain: An Uncensored History of DARPA, America’s Top-Secret Military Research Agency, Annie Jacobsen
Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity, Paul Kingsnorth
The Abolition of Man, C.S. Lewis
Man Against Mass Society, Gabriel Marcel
The Human Condition, Hannah Arendt
Transhumanist Reader, Nick Bostrom
Irresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked, Adam Alter
Transhumanist Declaration, edited by Max More, Natasha Vita-More
The Techno-Optimist Manifesto, Marc Andreessen
Transhumanism and Posthumanism(s) on Education, Allen Porter
Transhumanism, Francis Fukuyama
Transhumanism, Julian Huxley
Transhumanist FAQ, Nick Bostrom
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The future of our institutions will be shaped by the students educated today. UATX exists to form leaders prepared to meet that responsibility.