Core Guide
Xavier's undergraduate core curriculum engages all areas of the Liberal Arts Catholic Jesuit tradition to encourage Xavier women and men to become people of learning and reflection, integrity and achievement, in solidarity for and with others, an overall perspective that can be summed up with the phrase: "One for All."
During the First-Year Experience, students begin to explore what this means for them.
Consistent with the mission of Xavier University as a Jesuit, Catholic university rooted in the liberal arts tradition, the Ethics/Religion and Society sequence of courses provides a basis for students to become intellectually, morally and spiritually educated individuals capable of critical reflection on ethical and religious questions of social significance from the perspective of multiple disciplines with unique methods.
A liberal arts education is both the education of free people and education that frees. It will free you by means of the various arts or disciplines that cover the broad range of human experience, aimed at perfecting the highest and most specifically human abilities. It will free you by emphasizing not only knowledge, but the ability to analyze it meaningfully, to organize and integrate it, to break out into new areas and acquire new knowledge. It will free you by helping you to integrate your own rational and emotional life. The Liberal Arts Perspectives are the beginning of a lifelong personal integration, which leads to practical, wise and sensitive action in the world.
Cultural understanding means the ability to think analytically about our culture as well as others different from our own. It is essential to responsible participation in modern society. Numerous courses at Xavier will ask students to analyze systematically the complex relationships among diversity, inequality and social, economic and political power, both locally and globally. To enrich that experience, some courses have been designated as particularly structured to cultivate these abilities.
Skills of rhetoric and quantitative analysis cross all disciplines in their usefulness and importance, and those who can wield them well will find themselves more highly respected and their aims in the world more easily achieved. Students will build on them in many courses throughout your college career. To ensure every student reaches at least a satisfactory level of instruction in these areas, both Composition/Rhetoric, introductory second language and some "flagged" courses are required.