Core Curriculum
Our Core Curriculum is an exciting venture in learning. It combines the strong foundation of a traditional curriculum with alternative paths for you to build on. As a student, you will take courses in four areas that progress toward a capstone senior seminar which welds together the wisdom accrued in your major with more general questions from across the spectrum of human inquiry.
Core courses are small, and stress basic critical thinking, clear writing, and analyze issues from different perspectives. Each of the four areas challenges you to raise thoughtful questions, evaluate conclusions and arguments, and devise creative solutions.
Creative Arts
Courses in the Creative Arts aim to foster our understanding of questions common to all the arts. You will construct a basis on which to explore further both the broad purposes of all the arts as well as unique achievements of particular art forms. The courses concentrate on a small cluster of basic principles -- representation, evocation, context -- shared by all the arts, and you will work on understanding how each of the different arts make use of those fundamental ideas.
Human Heritage
Courses in the Human Heritage aim to foster our understanding of the rich traditions that shape human social life, including the ideas, visions, and cultural practices that are shared, lasting, and tenacious. Whether we look at the prevailing values of modern, cosmopolitan society or the folk traditions that develop in small communities, these deeply rooted realities help us both to understand our identity and to make choices about our affinity with family, community, history, values, and place. Through direct engagement with primary texts, students learn to ask questions, debate ideas, and come to understand ways that we experience past events and ideas as part of the fabric of our own lives.
Self and Society
Courses in Self and Society aim to foster a deeper understanding of both ourselves and our society, which enables us to transform both. Societies provide the ground in which we grow and develop into the selves that we are. As a result, it is impossible to understand ourselves and those around us without an understanding of the societies that have and are shaping us. This understanding of the social world in which we think, work, and live enables us to be more than just the passive recipients of this "shaping." Furthermore, societies are also shaped by the beliefs, values, and activities of human beings. It is impossible to consciously shape one's own society for the better without an understanding of its current structure and how it got that way. In particular, we need to be aware that what seems "natural" are socially created ways of thinking and doing.
Science and Technology
Courses in Science and Technology take a broad view of the scientific endeavor by studying scientific reasoning, discovery and invention as they are understood in basic concepts which appear in particular historical contexts. The courses will cover traditional advanced study in a particular scientific area as well as integrative courses such as oceanography, earth sciences, astronomy, and human biochemistry, or health. Laboratory courses will feature a "hands on" dimension such as field work, regular laboratory sessions, or other appropriate methodical testing of classroom concepts.