The most radical experiment in American higher education today isn't taking place at an Ivy League university. Nor is it happening at one of the country's prestigious liberal-arts colleges such as Amherst or Davidson or at a big-name state university. No, this bold and significant academic undertaking has been quietly but powerfully under way for more than three decades on a bucolic mountain meadow near Santa Paula, Calif., 65 miles northwest of Los Angeles and not far from Santa Barbara.

Thomas Aquinas College (TAC) is a small school, and Roman Catholic, as its name suggests. Its 330 students come for four years from all over the United States and several foreign countries to read the Great Books of Western Civilization: ancients such as Sophocles and Aristotle down through significant moderns such as Edward Gibbon and Flannery O'Connor.

TAC students study Latin for two years. And they pursue a curriculum based on the trivium and quadrivium -- the concept of education in the "seven arts" developed in the Middle Ages -- which means everyone who graduates from Thomas Aquinas will have training in grammar, rhetoric, and logic (the trivium), and in arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and music (the quadrivium). As one Thomas Aquinas senior said, "It is truly a liberal education!"

But students have another reason for choosing Thomas Aquinas College. The education they receive there is tied firmly to the Christian faith, giving their encounter with the great ideas of the West a structure and foundation -- and a perspective from which to judge those ideas worthwhile or not, true or false. The strong religious connection, unabashedly prized and cultivated at Thomas Aquinas College, is itself rare and revolutionary in an age when most institutions of higher learning are rigorously secular, and many schools that once had intimate ties with religion now distance themselves from all aspects of faith.

"True education is hard," notes TAC President Thomas Dillon, explaining the college's mission. "Here we believe that the mind is wedded to reason, and we have confidence that when the mind is applied, it can get someplace." Faith, he adds, is essential to education because "we are fallen creatures and the church is a guide."

Adherence to Catholic tradition is only one element of the school's radicalism, however. Its approach to education is another. At Thomas Aquinas there are no professors. Members of the faculty are known as tutors, a designation that underlines their closeness to the students, a closeness that other small colleges often boast about but which at TAC is a reality students at most other schools can only envy.

Is Thomas Aquinas College truly radical, steeped as it is in very old traditions? Yes, but certainly not in one modern meaning of the word that sees radical as that which is "extreme" or "marked by a considerable departure from the usual or traditional" (Merriam Webster's Collegiate Dictionary). Rather, TAC is radical in another sense of the word, still in use, which springs from the Latin word "radix," meaning root. Radical in this earlier meaning points to that which is "of or relating to the origin" and "fundamental."

In the words of one Thomas Aquinas tutor, "What we are doing here is very much like what went on at the University of Paris in the 13th century," when Thomas Aquinas taught there. What the tutor meant is that TAC blends faith and reason, as they were blended in higher education at the high point of medieval Europe. Like the University of Paris and other European universities of the time, whether Oxford in England or Bologna in Italy, TAC finds no antagonism between faith and reason, indeed assumes that the two re-enforce one another and, when united, provide the best of all educations.

Insight spent a week on TAC's campus earlier this year, the guest of the college. Senior writer Stephen Goode and photographer Rick Kozak had free rein of classrooms and unfettered access to students, tutors and administration with the single caveat that classroom discussion not be disturbed. The stipulation was the first of many signs showing that Thomas Aquinas students come first.

TAC was founded in 1971 in Calabasas, Calif., then moved to its present location in the foothills of Los Padres National Forest in 1978. The setting is breathtaking: High mountains rise steeply in the background. Mornings are greeted with the sounds of many birds. Cattle graze on nearby mountain slopes. On most days, everything is bathed in brilliant Southern California sunlight.

Students live in white, Colonial Spanish-style dormitories with tile roofs and names such as St. Katherine of Alexandria Hall (for women) and Sts. Peter & Paul (men). Dorms are off-limits to members of the opposite sex. A campus dress code for attire worn in classes requires modest dresses or skirts and blouses for women, slacks and collared shirts for men. Such modesty is unusual on today's campuses, to say the least, but the students embrace it wholeheartedly. What's probably far more difficult for them to adjust to is how classes are conducted at Thomas Aquinas, which uses a system far different from any they are likely to have encountered and one at odds with mainstream American higher education.

At TAC, the faculty does not lecture while students take notes on what the instructor says. Instead, the students and a tutor engage in conversation about the text that was to be mastered for that particular day: a reading from Plato, say, or a proof from Sir Isaac Newton, or a section of a Mozart sonata. This places great demands on students. They can't remain passive as they might when a professor lectures. No, to participate actively in class discussions, TAC students must read that day's assignment, and have mastered it sufficiently to talk about it seriously and articulately during TAC's hourlong daytime tutorials and two-hour evening seminars.

"Here we think of the text as a lecture to grapple with," said Juliana Vazquez, now a sophomore. "You can't go to secondary sources for an explanation of the text. You must use the original." And getting on top of the original can be difficult: "For Aristotle's Posterior Analytics [required of all freshmen]," Vazquez notes wryly, "a one-time reading is not enough."

It is in grappling intimately with the texts and learning to talk about them in class that true learning takes place, students will tell you. "The curriculum demands time and focus," explains student Christopher Nuñez, from Miami. "In class, you have to quote [from the texts]. You have to form an argument."

And forming a cogent argument can be difficult. Students spend a great deal of time in classroom preparation. Vazquez, for example, who transferred to TAC after a year at Princeton University, said she does more homework at Thomas Aquinas (four hours a day at a minimum, for 18 hours of class per week) than she ever did at Princeton. Several papers will be written in most courses. Seniors do a longer paper, the senior thesis. Students whose grade average falls below a "C" for two successive terms are dismissed from the program.

Grades at the college are based on a tutor's assessment of a student's understanding of the subject matter as demonstrated in classroom participation, required papers and examinations. Twice a year during their first three years at TAC students sit with their tutors in what are called "Don Rags" and hear recommendations on how to improve classroom performance and play a richer part in the intellectual life the school provides.

Most students relish the hard work. Emily Harrison from Missouri, for example, uses words that make her first year sound like boot camp. "The first semester is designed to smash you down and take out your teen-age cockiness, to shake you down to your foundations and begin really to educate you," she says. "I discovered a whole new level of fatigue."

Of no tutorial at Thomas Aquinas is this more true than the tutorials dealing with Euclid, the ancient Greek geometer, whose book, Elements, students take up their first year. In Elements, Euclid offers a series of geometric proofs, systematically and meticulously developed, which the freshmen must learn in detail.

Tutors call on individual students to demonstrate the proofs on the blackboard, a scary prospect, especially for the mathematically inept, who will spend hours preparing for that class alone. Yet students, however much they feared Euclid as first-year students, are likely to come to appreciate him as upperclassmen and look upon their encounter with his Elements as a central part of their TAC education.

They come to see Euclid's careful and deliberate demonstration of geometric proof as opening up a whole new way of thinking for them, an impressive example of reasoning at its best. And this is what the college intends. President Dillon, for example, who is also a tutor, notes that "Euclid is an antidote to skepticism."

Does TAC's tutorial system work and provide the kind of intellectual stimulation it promises? To an impressive extent, the answer is yes, it does. There are off days, when things don't go as well as they might: Tutorials with long, awkward pauses when discussion doesn't get off the ground or classes where students doze. But at what college does that not happen? At their best, the tutorials and seminars provide for a lively exchange of ideas among tutors and students. What's impressive is that no student tends to dominate discussion in an attempt to catch the tutor's eye and show up his fellow students.

What's equally impressive is that the classes are truly discussions. It's not unusual for tutors modestly to say, "Maybe I'm crazy, but my opinion about that is ..." Or for students to say out loud, "Wait a minute, everyone seems to be getting this but me." TAC classes are a struggle to get at the truth with everyone participating on an equal level. As tutor Michael Paietta put it: "This system is a good antidote to vanity."

It should be said that, at their best, Thomas Aquinas classes are very good indeed. In his offbeat but valuable guide, Cool Colleges for the Hyper-Intelligent, Self-Directed, Late-Blooming, and Just Plain Different (2000), Donald Asher stated simply: "The best college class I ever attended, undergraduate or graduate, was at Thomas Aquinas College."

It must also be noted that the college does not intend that learning be limited to the classrooms. Tutors and students meet outside the tutorials and seminars and discuss ideas. Intellectual life at TAC is an ongoing process, where encounters among students and tutors in the cafeteria can fill gaps in learning left in classroom discussions.

It's a place too where there's a great deal of contact between upperclassmen and freshmen who may be at sea in the tutorial system and in need of help from someone who already has read the works by Plato, Thomas Aquinas or Linnaeus that freshmen are required to read.

Protestant students are welcome at the college, and there are several. A Jewish student wears a yarmulke. Do non-Catholics feel excluded? Maybe a little, some students say. But anyone who attends Thomas Aquinas chooses to do so and wants to be there. As Matt Dale, an upperclassman and a devout Protestant put it: "It is easier for me to be here than it would be for me to be at Berkeley."

Older students are welcome, too. Jonathan Golding is a charismatic Episcopalian who was in his mid-30s when his job with Earthlink brought him into contact with TAC. He liked what he saw and decided to enroll. And there is a story that many on the campus like to tell about the businessman from Oklahoma who came to Thomas Aquinas with his daughter, who was considering the school. She found the campus too isolated and wanted to go elsewhere. Her dad was enthusiastic. "But look at the curriculum! The Great Books," he pleaded. The daughter didn't enroll, but dad did, even though he was close to 60. He acted in the plays the students put on every year and took an active part in campus events, and graduated in four years.

Tuition is $16,800 and room and board another $5,200, for a total $22,000, which makes basic costs at TAC less expensive than at most private liberal-arts colleges. The college, which receives no subsidies from government or the Catholic Church, strives to provide help to every student who qualifies and wants to attend. Financial help is available, including a work-study program that has students trimming shrubs and caring for lawns as well as working at various tasks indoors. Golding, for example, spends 14 hours a week editing the online Thomas Aquinas Review.

To be admitted to Thomas Aquinas, applicants must take the SAT or ACT and arrange for letters of reference. The college asks potential students to make every effort to visit the school to see what it's like.

Written essays are required, including one on what appeals to them about Thomas Aquinas College and why they want to attend. Another essay asks them to write about their "reading habits and experience with books," surely very important at TAC. Explained director of admissions Thomas Susanka, "What we are looking for is an already developed intellectual appetite. We look to see if the student is engaged morally and physically and has good discipline skills."

In St. Augustine Hall, a classroom building, a posted notice underlines the college's isolated location. ATTENTION: THERE HAVE BEEN TWO RECENT MOUNTAIN LION SIGHTINGS IN THE AREA OF THE HIKING TRAIL. Students sometimes admit to being lonely at the college, especially those without cars on weekends. But there are compensations. Serious homework can get done, for example. Says Nuñez, "There is an absence of options that tempt, such as a nearby Cineplex." And many students revel in the scenic beauty, taking hikes in the mountains and jogging in the early-morning coolness.

Afternoons students can be found on the playing fields and outdoor basketball courts. President Dillon, who loves basketball and plays the game with students one-third his age, promised, breathlessly, "We are going to have a gymnasium."

Other buildings are in the works, too, such as a new church, Our Lady of the Most Blessed Trinity Chapel, making the college a work in progress. Meanwhile, the president's office, and the offices of tutors and administration offices, are in mobile units that will disappear eventually, as the school takes complete shape.

There is a timeless order to life at Thomas Aquinas College, marked by heavy attendance of daily Mass and by the prayer that opens every class -- "Come Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of thy faithful and enkindle in them the fire of Thy love ..." -- said sometimes in English, sometimes in Latin, and sung in music tutorials.

Campus buildings are symmetrical, attractive and linked by arcades with a series of arches, reflecting the sense of good order and harmony students encounter in Euclid. TAC is a place where it is not at all surprising to find a tutor telling students to have proper regard for the mystery of life and urging them "to make room for a due portion of wonder."

"We really are countercultural here," says tutor Mark Clark, who compared TAC's status as a religious institution in a very secular society to the Mennonites who have kept their ways in a world that does not share their traditions. Clark allows how the comparison isn't exact, but one knows what he means.

Still, in a very real sense Thomas Aquinas College is countercultural only if considered in terms of present-day, contemporary America. Viewed from the vantage point of history, a college that unites reason and faith isn't exceptional at all. It's mainstream. Founding Father Benjamin Rush, for example, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a physician and an evangelical Christian, wrote that "The only foundation for a useful education in a republic is to be laid in religion."

And others throughout American history have agreed. Observed the 20th-century conservative intellectual Russell Kirk, "All culture arises out of religion. When religious faith decays, culture must decline, though often seeming to flourish for a space after the religion which has nourished it has sunk into disbelief."

A significant portion of today's college and university students in the United States understand what Kirk meant and recognize the importance of religion in their lives. A recent John Templeton Foundation study carried out by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that 77 percent of the students surveyed believe "we are spiritual beings." Seventy-seven percent of the students in the survey also said they pray regularly. Not surprisingly, the study concluded that significant numbers of students reported losing their religious beliefs gradually between their freshman and junior years and complained that colleges and universities provide no guidance when it comes to things religious.

Surely such a school as TAC and others with religious faith at the core of their curricula would appeal to these spiritually deprived young people. There is evidence that this is true. Writing earlier this year in a Scripps Howard News Service article, David Davenport, a Pepperdine University professor, noted that the 104 colleges in the Council for Christian Colleges and Universities had experienced a 27 percent growth rate since 1997, a figure that is more than three times higher than the growth rate of 8 percent at all degree-granting institutions.

Those figures would not surprise students at Thomas Aquinas College. "I have friends who go to other places and they tell me what their days are like, and I tell them what mine are like, and mine are better," says Emily Harrison.

Nuñez, the student from Miami, has a friend who went to a large, famous university. They compare their educational experiences. "His finals were right out of a book. There is no demanding curriculum. He doesn't have to learn how to form an argument," notes Nuñez. "What is he paying for?"