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Private Higher Education Institutions

Short description

The Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) is an independent liberal arts college founded in 2006 on the foundations established by its predecessor, the Society for Higher Learning. BISLA’s primary focus is to use modern liberal arts as an educational method to provide the best quality education for its students. The liberal arts approach to education, with its open choice for students to shape and gradually choose a specialization, along with its insistence on mastering the intellectual skills of writing, oral presentation, and research, develops skills needed for academia and employment in the 21st century. The method of teaching in small seminars and tutorials, encouraging discussion, debate and serious study of core texts and primary sources, and mixing courses from all disciplines is the combination that provides undergraduate students the intellectual capacities needed to produce graduates who would be at the forefront of the defence of turbulent democracies within the EU and around the world. Emphasis is also placed on extracurricular activities, long-term research projects, internships, and volunteering as important for the development of life skills.

Scientific research/artistic projects

Project Philosophical Anthropology in the Context of Current Crises of Symbolic Structures is supported by the Slovak Research and Development Agency (APVV) and delves into the nature of human beings as creators and interpreters of symbolic structures. It explores how humans shape, understand, and transform symbolic forms like science, art, politics, and religion, which in turn shape their perception of reality and influence their decision-making. The research focuses on the current crises affecting these symbolic structures. Rather than viewing these crises merely as dysfunctions, the project seeks to uncover how they represent transformative processes that alter human self-conception and open up new possibilities. In this project, the Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) collaborates with the Philosophy Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences and Trnava University’s Philosophy Department. BISLA also publishes the journal Kritika & Kontext (www.kritika.sk) which was founded in 1996 and is part of a network of European cultural journals www.eurozine.com. BISLA also organizes the annual conference Liberal Herald, bringing together students and experts on an equal platform.

International relations

The Bratislava International School of Liberal Arts (BISLA) stands in the forefront of establishing a European form of liberal arts education by initiating ECOLAS (www.ecolas.eu), which is a network of European liberal arts colleges and programs. BISLA was, from the beginning, supported by the Endeavor Foundation of New York, which supports liberal arts schools and projects around the world and also serves to network them and support collaborative projects among them. The current focus of such collaboration is student mental health. Since 2011, BISLA is also a member of the Global Liberal Arts Alliance (GLAA), an alliance which brought together 33 colleges across the world. The participating colleges cooperate in the programs of connected courses- inter-collegial teaching of courses on connected topics. Together, they develop programs on the scholarship of teaching and learning, student-faculty and digital research, and more. GLAA also annually facilitates the participation of students in the prestigious Athens Democracy Forum and the Alliance Leadership Academy. Currently, BISLA is taking part in the project Designing and implementing Liberal Arts Studies in Ukraine (LibArt_UA). Introduction of Liberal Arts and Science programmes into the Ukrainian higher education system drawing upon the best practices and experience of EU partners. The project will establish interdisciplinary LAS programmes in 5 Ukrainian universities, design curricula, train teachers and staff and help promote liberal arts in Ukraine. BISLA also participates in the international project AI Aware Universities (under the auspices of the American University in Bulgaria), in a consortium of six universities developing guidelines on the ethical use of AI at universities. We also participate in the project REMAP (Reading for Meaning and Purpose), a consortium of five universities working to promote the culture of reading as a mode of self-discovery and development.