Why a classical liberal arts college just moved to Provo
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- Mount Liberty students are pictured at the Murray campus in an undated photo.
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- The Mount Liberty College logo is shown.
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- The Knight Block building, the new home of Mount Liberty College, is seen Thursday, Aug. 7, 2025, in Provo.
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- Mount Liberty students are pictured at the Murray campus in an undated photo.
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- Mount Liberty students are pictured on a field trip to Italy in an undated photo.
A Utah classical liberal arts school is making Provo its new home beginning with this upcoming school year.
Mount Liberty College, which opened in Murray in 2019, recently moved into the Knight Block building at 1 E. Center St. in the heart of downtown Provo and will hold an inauguration on Aug. 21.
School President Jennifer Jensen said the move was prompted by feedback from parents who said their kids wanted to have a better college experience.
“We weren’t realizing the problem until somebody started mentioning it to us,” Jensen said. “And then it totally made sense, and we decided we had to move. … There’s not the dating pool and the social pool (in Murray) that you get in a place like Provo, which has many different colleges, and so we decided to move to Provo so that they would have more of that college experience.”
Entering the 2025 school year, the four-year college has an enrollment of 25 students, with a goal of growing to 80-100 students, Jensen said. She explained it’s different from “today’s version of a liberal arts school,” and offers a broader educational scope of history, philosophy, government and economics.
Moving south was met with some difficulties — Jensen said they lost a few teachers who lived in Davis County due to the extended commute — but that they’ve reloaded with some new faculty and that the students are excited about the switch.
Beyond improving the college life of current students, the school also hopes the move compels more young adults to consider enrolling.
“We’re really hopeful that it will help other students dare to come, because it’s a different format, it’s a different place, and that’s not the norm,” Jensen said. “And so it takes somebody with some courage to be willing to do something different than everybody else. All their friends are just going to BYU or UVU or wherever, and they’re going somewhere different.”
Founded by Jensen, Mount Liberty Provost Gordon Jones and the late Frank Brown, Mount Liberty was inspired by Hillsdale College in Michigan and St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the group wanted to provide something similar in Utah that was more accessible and affordable.
Mount Liberty focuses on reading original sources, instead of textbooks, according to Jensen, who explained that while studying economics, students will read directly from the published works of Adam Smith, Frederic Bastia, John Stuart Mill, John Keynes, Karl Marx, Milton Friedman and Murray Rothbard.
“They’re hearing about all of these different versions,” said Jensen, “and they’re actually reading the original sources so they know exactly what these guys actually said, versus what a textbook tells you that they say, which in the end, has its own bias.
“And the idea is, if you read all sides of an issue, then you’re going to be able to find the truth, which is probably a mixture of them.”
After kids do the readings, they come into the classroom, participate in a Socratic discussion and then are expected to apply what they learned into the real world.
“What kind of a system do they believe in based on the things that they’re saying, and what should be applied today to maybe fix the economy and make it better?” Jensen said.
The school’s president acknowledged the comprehensive approach is “not for the faint of heart” but argued that a broad education is something that prepares students to be more versatile in the job market as they enter an “unknown future” where artificial intelligence threatens jobs.
“One of the reasons we do what we do is to try to help our students be really prepared for the future, and kind of an unknown future that we just don’t know what’s going to happen with it,” Jensen said.
Mount Liberty’s inauguration for the new location is at 7 p.m. Aug. 21 in the Knight Block building.
