Director: C. Henke
Program Site
Core Components
As the heart of Colgate’s academic program, the Liberal Arts Core Curriculum (LACC) is a common intellectual project for the University, exposing students to diverse fields of study and modes of intellectual and creative inquiry across the curriculum and furthering Colgate's commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion.
A great institution is a diverse institution. To foster deep understanding in a complex, rapidly changing world with a diversity of peoples and perspectives, this curriculum asks students and faculty to grapple with questions that shape knowledge, experience, and practice across time and space as well as across divisional and disciplinary boundaries. As a liberal arts college, Colgate strives to convey to students the value of a variety of skills and a willingness to examine one’s own experience and conditions from a variety of perspectives as well as to learn of contexts different from one’s own. Through these practices, this Core encourages lifelong learning, thoughtful citizenship, and inclusivity.
Core Communities
These multidisciplinary courses examine the patterns of inclusion and exclusion shaped by global phenomena (capitalism, colonialism, political ideologies, religions, and new technologies among many others) to better understand what it means to live in community.
Core Conversations
This course employs a set of five common texts to promote wide-ranging conversations, anchored in the past and directed toward the present. Core Conversations defines the term “text” expansively, not limiting it to written work but encompassing many modes of intellectual and creative expression from different cultures and time periods, including the distant past.
Core Sciences
These courses investigate the scientific process and the relationship between science and society while engaging with the histories, inequities, or social differences that can be and have been associated with science.
Students are expected to complete the core components by the end of their sophomore year. Approximately one-third of the fall 2024 FSEMs fulfill a core component.