Introduction to the Connecticut College Catalog - A Window Onto an Almost-Unlimited World of Learning

This catalog is a window onto an almost-unlimited world of learning: a liberal arts education at Connecticut College.

The liberal arts tradition derives from the vision of the ancient Romans that reality is an ordered whole with the disciplines forming complementary ways of understanding that whole. A liberal arts education aims to prepare men and women for a lifetime of learning, service and leadership. Connecticut College strives to fulfill this ideal through rigorous academic standards coupled with a commitment to honor and to community life.

Although 2,000 years old, the liberal arts are equally relevant today. Economists predict that intellectual capital will increasingly determine individual and national prosperity. An education in the liberal arts which prepares students for a lifetime of continuous learning is the best preparation for life in a rapidly-changing world. Connecticut College - with its dedicated teacher-scholars, unusual opportunities for joint research with faculty, sophisticated technological resources and global programs - is especially well-positioned to deliver on its promise.

But Connecticut College offers far more than excellent preparation for leadership. Since its founding in 1911, the College has distinguished itself as a living laboratory of democratic civil society. In this learning community, the pursuit of academic excellence is partner with the growth of the moral imagination. Students develop their intellectual depth and breadth while testing and strengthening values and civic virtues. Our community makes us people who bring hope to others - with knowledge and compassion, with analytical skills and a commitment to justice, with self-discipline and creativity.

With our honor code, commitment to civility, to tolerance, to the free exchange of ideas, to teaching and learning, we strive to be able, as the critic Edward Said has said, "to discover and travel among other selves, other identities, other varieties of the human adventure. But most essentially in this joint discovery of self and other, it is the role of the academy to transform what might be conflict or context or assertion into reconciliation, mutuality, recognition, creative interaction."

The great American scholar W.E.B. DuBois made a similar point decades earlier. The purpose of higher education, he wrote, "is, above all, to be the organ of that fine adjustment between real life and the growing knowledge of life, an adjustment which forms the secret of civilization."

In that spirit, this catalog is a map for intellectual and moral growth, a window onto a landscape of human possibility. It is up to you to begin the journey.