Bachelor of Arts in Humanities for Leadership

The Bachelor of Arts in Humanities for Leadership (BAHL) is a four-year, comprehensive, pre-professional, interdisciplinary degree that examines the intellectual, personal, and spiritual formation of men and women across ages and cultures. Students gain the analytic, practical, and academic skills necessary for effective, ethical leadership and bring those skills to bear in classrooms and campus organizations. The BAHL grows organically and methodologically from the core values of Seattle University’s Catholic and Jesuit mission. Ethical, efficacious and culturally competent describe the graduate of this degree. The following are its characteristic components: Interdisciplinary in Its Approach to Leadership: The degree is explicitly interdisciplinary and focuses on the intellectual development of the individual. It builds on the College’s history as an interdisciplinary, sequentially paced Humanities degree with a focus on what constitutes effective, ethical leadership; Integrated Global Jesuit Education Coupled with Technological Literacy: The degree embraces a focus both local and global, and includes formative experiences of learning and service in both arenas, including connectedness through technology as a door to distant friendship, to international discussions, to quick access to facts and to different minds and perspectives; Rooted in History and Modern in its Vision and Methods: The degree offers an education in the Humanities anchored by its Jesuit tradition and poised to recognize new needs, new resources, new imperatives, and new opportunities of helping, especially the poor and marginalized; Discernment as a Way of Life: Discernment is essential for the capacity to grow as persons by learning how to make choices that lead to greater recognition of the dignity of every human person. In effect, the practice of discernment is what is meant by leadership, namely, the ability to distinguish carefully in every act and decision the interior movements of attraction and repulsion, or consolation and desolation, in order to make choices that lead to a deeper sense of personal freedom, human authenticity, and global responsibility.