Thomas Aquinas College is a Catholic liberal arts college founded in 1971 by a group of lay Catholic educators concerned about the state of Catholic higher education, opening with 33 students on a leased former seminary campus. It teaches exclusively from the Great Books of Western civilization through small, seminar-style discussion classes rather than textbooks or lectures. Its original campus is in Santa Paula, California; the college added a second, New England campus in Massachusetts in 2019.