The 2016 Rhodes College Course Catalogue offers this description the Search course: Throughout its sixty-six year history, Search has embodied the College's guiding concern for helping students to become men and women of purpose, to think critically and intelligently about their own moral views, and to approach the challenges of social and moral life sensitively and deliberately. Students are encouraged to engage texts directly and to confront the questions and issues they encounter through discussions with their peers, exploratory writing assignments, and ongoing personal reflection. Special emphasis is given to the development and cultivation of critical thinking and writing skills under the tutelage of a diverse faculty drawn from academic disciplines across the Humanities, Fine Arts, Natural Sciences, and Social Sciences.Although the exact assignments vary year to year, students read from primary sources that span the millennia of recorded Western history and thought. The curriculum has included readings from: "The Epic of Gilgamesh," the Bible, the Quran, Homer, Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Aristophanes, Sophocles, Thucydides, Euripides, Livy, Plutarch, Horace, Ovid, Lucretius, Seneca, Cicero, Augustine, Dante, Aquinas, Chaucer, Machiavelli, Petrarch, More, Luther, Shakespeare, Descartes, Locke, Milton, Voltaire, Hume, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Goethe, Swift, Burke, Adam Smith, Benjamin Franklin, Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Kant, Marx, Emerson, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth, Goethe, de Tocqueville, Nietzsche, Darwin, Huxley, Planck, and many more.