Santa Clara University

THE SANTA CLARA CORE CURRICULUM

A university expresses its most basic values in its core curriculum, that part of an undergraduate education required of all students. The Santa Clara Core Curriculum combines traditional core strengths with a new emphasis on curricular integration, world cultures, and technology. It stems from the University Mission, which states “Santa Clara University is a Catholic and Jesuit institution that makes student learning its central focus.”

Within this framework, the Santa Clara Strategic Vision declares the University’s intention “to excel in educating men and women of competence, conscience, and compassion.” In pursuit of this aim, the University emphasizes the Catholic and Jesuit traditions of spirituality, intellectual excellence, study of Western and world cultures, internationalism, the promotion of faith and justice, and leadership as service to others. The University Core Curriculum seeks to further these values by fostering the strengths of a liberal education, including religious studies and ethics.

Accordingly, the Core seeks to create a university learning environment that enables students to achieve intellectual excellence, live as responsible citizens, and seek to be of constant service in creating a more just, humane, and sustainable society. The Core encompasses three thematic clusters: Laying Foundations, Reaching Out, and Integrating for Leadership.

The progression of these clusters is not strictly chronological, nor will all students study Core courses in exactly the same sequence. They will, however, study the same courses based upon the same sets of criteria for inclusion in the Core. It is hoped students will not just experience Core requirements as individual courses but as related educational experiences that help structure the students’ whole university study. The Santa Clara Core Curriculum expresses the psychological dynamics of building on the foundation of one’s developing identity (Who am I?), then moving out to encounter new realities (What is the world like?), and then returning to oneself to integrate these new realities into one’s world view as a basis for serving others (What is my relationship to the world? How should I act?). All of these stages, of course, take place every day for all learners. Thus, while each cluster has a primary theme, all three themes ought ultimately to find expression in each cluster. Senior capstones, departmental majors and minors, and University interdepartmental programs are other important ways of assisting students to integrate their complete university experience.

Laying Foundations
The first cluster of Core courses prepares the foundations for the competence and excellence that the University hopes will mark all of its graduates. The traditional building blocks of liberal education—language, culture, and mathematics—challenge students to reflect upon the diverse communities they have experienced in their own lives and to begin to sharpen the analytical tools they will need in whatever paths they choose.

Reaching Out
The second cluster of Core courses expands students’ perspectives in two ways. First, students are immersed in the methods of inquiry that a citizen of the 21st century requires to participate in a civic dialogue that is increasingly global in scope. This participation entails an ability to understand an expanding range of complex topics, including political, religious, scientific, ethical, and social concerns. Second, students are challenged to begin to understand the diverse cultures and societies with whom they share this fragile planet. The expansion of horizons in these ways is intended to encourage the continuing development of intellectually grounded moral compassion in the Santa Clara graduate.

Integrating for Leadership
The third cluster of Core courses represents transition courses that straddle both the Core and the focused areas of study that comprise students’ majors, minors, and other academic and co-curricular programs. They seek to complement these other areas of study by encouraging disciplined reflection on the moral stance those who have earned Santa Clara degrees will adopt in their lives as a result of their engagement with this University’s learning environment. Graduates will leave the University as lifelong learners with consciences that are at once both critically formed and always in the process of being critically re-formed.

University Core Curriculum Requirements
The courses the University prescribes to realize these themes vary slightly among the College of Arts and Sciences and the Schools of Business and Engineering and among their various degree and disciplinary programs. A college or school may impose a specification on the more general University requirements for a certain type of course. In many cases, because of the importance of one of these themes to the school’s fields of study, the school also imposes a supplementary requirement in that area by requiring students to take more of these courses. For example, while most students are required to take only two courses in Western culture, the College of Arts and Sciences requires its students in the humanities and arts to take a third course in the same sequence because a deeper historical understanding of Western culture is vital for study in these disciplines.

Each particular school also requires other distinctive courses that reflect additional educational objectives beyond those described in the themes of the University Core Curriculum. For example, the School of Business requires all of its students to take a two-course sequence in accounting to prepare them for the business environment, and the College of Arts and Sciences requires its students to take courses in ethnic studies and in fine arts. Some students—for example international students, students in the University Honors Program, and students majoring in certain disciplines—satisfy the University Core Curriculum or school requirements by taking special sections of the Core courses, special equivalent courses, or special courses in their major.

The requirements of the University Core Curriculum, including their specification and supplementation within each college or school, are outlined below.

Theme 1: Laying Foundations

• Two courses in English Composition
• One introductory course in Religious Studies
• One course in United States
• Two courses in Western Culture
• One course in Mathematics
• One course in a Second Language or equivalent (excluding Engineering majors)

Theme 2: Reaching Out

• One area studies course in World Cultures and Societies
• One intermediate course in Religious Studies
• One course in Social Science
• One course in Technology
• One Mathematics course and one laboratory course in Natural Science or two courses in Natural Science, one of which must be a laboratory course

Theme 3: Integrating for Leadership

• One course in Ethics
• One advanced course in Religious Studies
• One course in English writing
  College of Arts and Sciences Supplemental Degree Requirements
• One course in Ethnic Studies or Women’s and Gender Studies
• Four units of Fine Arts
• One additional course in World Cultures and Societies
• Second Language: Proficiency through the 002 level or equivalent for mathematics and natural science majors; proficiency through the 003 level or equivalent for all other majors
• One additional course in Western Culture for the Bachelor of Arts degree
• One additional course in Mathematics or Natural Science for a total of two each in Mathematics and Natural Science for the Bachelor of Science degree

Leavey School of Business Supplemental Degree Requirements

• Two courses in Economics
• One course: Contemporary American Business
• One course: Introduction to Business Computing
• Four units in Leadership Competency
• Two courses in Accounting
• Two courses in Data Analysis
• One course in Information Systems
• Five courses in the Business Core
• Second Language: Proficiency through the 002 level or equivalent

School of Engineering Supplemental Degree Requirements

• Seven courses in Mathematics and Natural Science
• At least 37 total units in the Humanities and Social Sciences, not including the third English writing course

Transfer students who enter the University with less than 44 units must take all three Religious Studies courses in the required sequence. Those who enter with 44 or more units may take any two Religious Studies courses.

New Undergraduate Core Curriculum
A new undergraduate Core Curriculum, building on the strengths of the current Core Curriculum, will begin in fall 2009. The new Core Curriculum will emphasize student learning in three areas: knowledge, habits of mind and heart, and engagement in the world. It will prepare students to be leaders of competence, conscience, and compassion for a 21st-century globalizing world.