As a Graduate Institute Alumnus, you are able to enroll in a 5th segment for credit or audit a precept or segment (auditing is Auditing is $1,150.00 – about a third of the usual cost). If there was a class that you want to retake, you can do that too! 2025 Summer Segments are Mathematics and Natural Science and
Politics and Society. Reading lists are on MySJC. Here’s this summer’s precept offerings.
Contact Michael Foote asap to get in!
ONLINE
Chaucer, Canterbury Tales
Ms. Erika Martinez
Pedagogy and Education
Mr. Llyd Wells
The Graduate Institute was founded for teachers and still attracts a large number of them. But we are all teachers of some sort and this preceptorial will help us think about that practice and that vocation. Unlike most preceptorials, we will read a range of different authors, ancient and modern alike, all of whom have written penetrating – and, I think, quite opposed – accounts of what is involved in shaping other minds, if that is even the right formulation to use. (If it isn’t, what is?) Authors to be read include, but are not limited to, Plato, Aristotle, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Dewey, Arendt
IN-PERSON SANTA FE
Cormac McCarthy: Fiction & Film
Mr. David Carl
Description: Since his death in 2023, critical evaluations of McCarthy’s work have ranked him as one of the most important voices in American fiction of the last century. His work is ranked alongside classic American authors like Hemmingway and Faulkner and his prose has been compared at its best to that of Joyce and Melville. In particular, the violent collision of the comic and the tragic in his novels, plays, and screenplays has been seen as a uniquely American expression of the human condition, simultaneously horrifying and hilarious. Writing at the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries, McCarthy combines elements of classic American writing found in authors like Emerson, Poe, and Hawthorne with a more contemporary fascination with the cinema. His earliest writings were for the stage and theatre, and towards the end of his life he increasingly came to write with the movies in mind, moving from the lush ornate prose of early novels like Suttree and Blood Meridian to the sparse stark style of later works like No Country for Old Men (2005) and The Road (2006), both of which seem to have been written with the idea of their being made into movies (which they were). In fact, McCarthy wrote a screenplay called No Country for Old Men in 1987, nearly 20 years before his novel of the same name was published. Eventually he skipped the stage of writing a novel altogether and wrote an original screenplay, The
Counselor, made into a film in 2013. This was his final work before the paired novel The Passenger/Stella Maris was published the year before he died. In all these works, common themes emerge: the Manichean presence of Evil as an active force in our world; the destructive power of greed; the ubiquity of violence in human interactions; the loneliness of the outcast; and the deep human yearning, despite the unavoidable evil, greed, violence, and alienation, to encounter and celebrate forms of beauty, transcendence, and understanding.
Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition
Mr. Richard McCombs
Our main project will be to study Hannah Arendt’s book, The Human Condition, which explores the nature of different kinds of human activities that she calls work, labor, and political action. After that we will read essays from Between Past and Future on such topics as tradition, history, authority, and freedom.
SCHEDULES
In-Person Summer (8 Weeks)
Seminar: Tuesday and Thursday, 7–9 p.m.
Tutorial: Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, 2:45–4 p.m.
Preceptorial: Monday and Wednesday, 7–9 p.m.
Online Summer (10 Weeks)
10 weeks, 3 nights/week. Tutorial meets each night. Seminar and Preceptorial meet alternating weeks of “Seminar, Preceptorial, Seminar” and “Preceptorial, Seminar, Preceptorial.” This gives us space for 15 seminars, 15 preceptorials, and 30 tutorials.
Tutorial: Monday, Tuesday, Thursday, 8:15—9:30 p.m. MT
Seminar: Monday and Thursday, 5:30-7:30 p.m. MT (weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 9); Tuesday, 5:30–7:30 p.m. (weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, 10)
Preceptorial: Tuesday, 5:30–7:30 p.m. MT (weeks 1, 3, 5, 7, 9); Monday and Thursday, 5:30–7:30 p.m. (weeks 2, 4, 6, 8, 10)
