Arts & Sciences General Education Curriculum

Blue Book Rationale. Liberal-arts education marks a student's entry into intellectual maturity, which is characterized both by broad interests and by knowledge in depth. While undergraduates continue to develop skills, acquire information, and undergo socialization, their distinctive purpose is to transform themselves into independent, responsible, contributing members of society. Liberal-arts institutions assist students in accomplishing this purpose by presenting the world to them as an object of knowledge and understanding and as a place in which there is significant work to be done. In such institutions, students learn ways in which to produce that work. Above all, they learn to think critically and independently, to tolerate ambiguity, and to respect multiplicity. As the foundation for such an education, the general education curriculum required of all Arts and Sciences students has several functions to perform.

  1. It incorporates students into academic community, promoting their awareness of common purposes and interests as students. The importance of this awareness is that it makes them more effective resources to each other as learners and also that it helps them to understand their work and its consequences as part of a collective undertaking rather simply an exercise in self-improvement.

  2. It ensures that students possess the communication skills required to function effectively in an undergraduate academic environment.

  3. It encourages an integrative view of a range of academic fields. Such a view distinguishes the matter and methods of one field from those of the next, but just as importantly it indicates something of the relationships among the kinds of work done in various fields. This integrative view should provide enough breach for students to compare the methods of inquiry in one field to those in another and for them to recognize that some problems benefit from combining the methods of two or more fields.

  4. At the same time, it introduces students to the particular perspectives of each of these fields, allowing them to develop a preliminary practical understanding of why the field exists, what is driving concerns are, and how its practictioners pursue those concerns. This introduction both aids students in making an informed selction of a major and of elective coursework and enables (and inclines) them to attend meaningfully to developments in fields in which they do not eventually specialize.

Such an approach means designating, within each field of study, required courses that are linked by their content and methods, not simply by the departments in which they make their home. The goal of this approach is to equip the student with a set of resources that not only are varied but can be related coherently to each other.