As we enter a new year and, indeed, a new decade, I would like to offer some thoughts from my perspective in Academic Affairs on how Saint Joseph’s University is approaching the education of our students as we begin to implement the new curriculum that the University officially adopted in May 2008.
While we thought that it was challenging to establish and balance the intellectual content that would best suit our students in the new millennium and confine that content to an eight semester timeframe, developing the courses and implementing those new courses for the curriculum has been equally challenging. In the past year faculty have spent significant time and talent developing courses, approving and/or revising those courses, and crafting schedules that will provide faculty the time and space in which to teach those courses.
Fortunately, we are now able to continue renovation of the Maguire Campus which will provide needed classroom space for the interchanges between faculty and students that lie at the heart of the distinctive education we offer at Saint Joseph’s. I would like to encourage you to familiarize yourself with the new curriculum that we will begin to implement in fall 2010. We cannot offer all the new courses immediately, but we will phase them in over fall 2010 and spring 2011 so that we will then be able to offer the whole new curriculum in fall 2011. You may follow this link for a full description of the new curriculum. Below is a brief summary.
Recommendations on the General Education Program (GEP)
I. Signature Courses (6 Courses)*
A. Jesuit Tradition Common Core
1. Philosophy – Moral Foundations
2. Theology – Faith, Justice, and the Catholic Tradition
B. Cultural Legacy Common Core
3. English – Texts and Contexts
4. History – Forging the Modern World
C. Signature Variable Core
5. First Year Seminar
6. Faith & Reason Course
*Texts and Contexts, Forging the Modern World and First Year Seminar are “signature” courses for non-transfer students only.
II. Variable Courses (6 – 9 courses)
1. Fine Arts or Literature
2. Mathematics
3. Natural Science (one 4 – credit course with laboratory phased in over eight
years)
4. Non-native language (0 – 2 courses)
5. Social/Behavioral Science
6. Philosophy (Philosophical Anthropology)
7. Theology (Religious Difference)**
8. Writing (0 – 1 course)
**Cannot satisfy the diversity, globalization or non-Western area studies degree requirement.
III. Integrative Learning (3 courses)
The remaining three courses in the GEP will be chosen by the major departments
for students in that major. These courses must be College of Arts & Sciences
courses outside the major department and may be specified broadly or narrowly.
The purpose of this requirement is to foster integration of the major with
general education.
If you are not able to take the time to explore this information fully, I would like to offer here a document that captures the voice of the faculty who have created this innovative and comprehensive curriculum. The quote is from the “Preface: Goals of a Saint Joseph’s Education” from the Comprehensive Curriculum Review Final Report: A Proposal for Curricular Change. This preface was written by our faculty and expresses the idealism that informs the courses in the new curriculum. I think you will agree with me that these words articulate powerfully and beautifully what education should mean and does mean at Saint Joseph’s.
Preface: Goals of a Saint Joseph’s Education
As a Catholic, Jesuit university, Saint Joseph's University offers a
distinctive liberal education to its undergraduates, one that flows from a 450
year old tradition yet seeks to form men and women prepared to address the
problems of our contemporary world. Whether our students aspire to professional
careers in business, the health professions, the arts, education or law, each of
them should carry within a spirit of free inquiry directed to serving the needs
of others--their colleagues, their family and friends, their community, their
nation and their world. The curriculum we are proposing to structure their
education is designed to help them acquire the knowledge, skills, and habits of
mind and heart that will enable them to be leaders in their chosen fields and in
their personal and social lives.
In this report, we present:
- Educational goals identified with the mission of Saint Joseph's University
- A rationale for curricular change
- Goals for general education and a General Education Program (GEP) designed to accomplish them
- Goals for concentrations and recommendations designed to accomplish them
- Goals for electives that will encourage students to engage in the sort of free inquiry essential to innovative thinking and self-directed learning
- Goals for extracurricular experiences that will deepen student engagement with the formal curriculum and extend their learning into contexts beyond it.
Since the release of the Steering Committee's Interim Report in Fall 2004, the corporate faculty has been considering the questions of what we want our students to know, to do, and to be as a result of their four-year educational experience at Saint Joseph's. The following are the qualities we as a faculty seek to encourage in our students:
Intellectual: Innovative thinking, creative problem solving, and entrepreneurial leadership begin with an habitual curiosity that asks how things function and why. However, curiosity without direction is mere enthusiasm, a passing mood. A Saint Joseph's University education, therefore, must nurture students' natural curiosity about the world while teaching them to be thoughtful in their responses to it. Regardless of their concentration, all our students should be challenged to be keen observers, who are analytic in their approach to problem solving, and reflective about the near and long-term consequences of any solutions they propose. General education especially must provide students opportunities to think critically, to question assumptions, and to formulate reasoned and articulate responses to a wide range of natural and cultural phenomena within a rich historical context. Such opportunities will foster the sort of self-directed inquiry that enables students to excel in their chosen concentration, careers and lives. Excellence depends on the acquisition of broad knowledge coupled with the development of disciplined methods of inquiry, the result of sustained diligent effort. In the spirit of magis, students must be encouraged throughout their education to aspire to the highest academic standards.
Spiritual: Intellectuals motivated by curiosity will often encounter the limits of human reason and ask questions whose answers perhaps lie only in the lap of divine intelligence. Fundamental to a Roman Catholic and Jesuit university is the requirement that students study theology, so they will come to examine their own spiritual intuitions and evaluate the religious claims of others in a systematic and reasoned way. Saint Joseph's University graduates should be spiritual in their outlook on human relationships, on the relationship between different cultures and faith traditions, and on the relationship between humanity and the rest of the universe. In all faith traditions, rigorous thinking about theological truth claims is essential to spiritual formation, and a strong grounding in theology will help our graduates sustain throughout their lives a desire to know and revere the world more fully.
Purposeful: Finally, a Saint Joseph's University education must form men and women of vision, who can articulate difficult problems, identify effective solutions, build consensus and lead sustained efforts to implement solutions. Enlightened leadership requires understanding the ethical context of decision-making and the ability to clearly communicate it. If our graduates are to be strong advocates of the greater good in their professional, public, and private lives, their education should foster in them a deepening awareness of the least among us: the poor, the socially marginalized, and the oppressed. Such awareness augments understanding of the dignity of the human person and serves as an impetus to contribute to the creation of a more just world. We must therefore seek to provide all students not only with knowledge of the economic, political and social inequities that exist in our world but also with practical experience at formulating and implementing appropriate responses to social injustice.
If we provide our students an education that helps them become intellectuals who are spiritually engaged in their work and purposeful in their efforts to achieve the greater good, not only will we achieve recognition as the preeminent comprehensive Catholic university in the Northeast, but we will make a difference - preparing graduates to be and do their best in any and all circumstances in which they find themselves throughout their lives. Our challenge as a faculty is to envision and implement a curriculum that accomplishes this. After five years of sustained effort on the part of all, the contours of that curriculum have emerged.
