The Integrated Humanities Program officially began in 1970, though a trial program began the year before. There were 20 students in the first year, and, by the second year, the program had 140 students.
The students of the IHP were given an education through classical literature, poetry, stargazing, and even waltzing lessons. Callahan said class lectures were complemented by experience, poetry memorization, and an effort to inspire within students an attitude of wonder.
He said Senior advocated for "poetic learning."
"The idea of a way in which we can come to know the world in a poetic way through the imagination," Callahan explained.
Kyle Washut, academic dean at Wyoming Catholic College, lamented a trend toward increasingly abstract specialization in academic research and teaching. He likened the situation to a professional astronomer who is unable to identify a single constellation in the sky.
Washut said Senior pushed for tangible experiences, adding context and texture to learning.
"The love of 'the real' is also really important for John Senior. There is a sort of moral formation from being rooted in the land, rooted in this real direct experience, either through that raw encounter with nature or through a vicarious, poetic experience," he said.
"[A person] has to go out and experience that world, look at that world, know that world as [their] own and then … engage with more careful reflection on that world," Washut added.
The IHP was a two-year program for students. Its inclusion of classic literature and poetry fulfilled several core curriculum requirements at the University of Kansas, making it attractive even to students who might not otherwise seek out such a program.
Students read epics of Homer and Virgil, the philosophy of Plato, Greek and Roman historians, and the Bible. They also read St. Augustine of Hippo, St. Thomas Aquinas, Chaucer, Don Quixote, and Shakespeare.
Twice weekly, students would listen to the three professors discuss the texts together. As part of their weekly class, students would also engage in discussions, and conduct poetry recitations. Students took an immersive Latin class, which was based on rhetoric, rather than a more systematic approach to the language.
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IHP was also renowned for its extracurricular activities, and seemingly unconventional methods of education. Students were encouraged to attend stargazing sessions, ballroom dances, and medieval banquets. Before every lecture, an upperclassman would teach the students a song, usually an English ballad or American folk melody.
The program has inspired similar initiatives, including Wyoming Catholic College. In 2005, the college was founded by Bob Carlson, who was a graduate assistant for IHP and an undergraduate student for Senior when he taught in Wyoming. Washut said Carlson was inspired by Senior and sought to create a similar experience.
"That humanities course, like it was at Pearson, it was not any one discipline, but it was a combination of literature, history, and even some philosophy text, and occasionally some theology texts, but all read with the goal of encountering them and engaging them in much the way that students would have engaged them at the IHP," he said.
"[It is] a raw encounter with the natural realities as a necessary foundation for further studies. So we have a field science, we have a backpacking trip, we have a horse riding class," he said.
IHP inspired conversions and religious vocations. The founding monks of the Benedictine Our Lady of Clear Creek Abbey in Oklahoma were students of the humanities program. After they graduated from KU, many students traveled abroad and discovered the Abbey of Our Lady of Fontgombault in France. Some of the travelers became monks in the order, and, in 1999, they returned home to establish a monastery in Oklahoma.
Coakley and Conley, who were roommates at KU, were spiritually inspired by the program.