The Cowan Program of Liberal Arts

The degree program is named in honor of Donald and Louise Cowan, because this institution owes chiefly to them its understanding of the overarching form of education and of the way it may be embodied in a curriculum.

The action of liberal education at the Erasmus Institute can be said to proceed through two general stages: one represented by the student’s progress through the range of core courses in a variety of disciplines and the other by study of upper division courses in one of the major liberal arts disciplines.

It is, first, through participation in the core curriculum that students discover themselves, holding opinions in reserve until they absorb the thoughts, ideas, images, and actions of the tradition they study. Each student, regardless of major, takes a six-hour Humanities course every semester throughout the four years. This sequence of courses includes studies in philosophy, literature, politics, history, and theology, taught by faculty from various disciplines. Hence the entire student body, in any given semester, is enrolled in the same course, freshmen beginning at whatever part of the cycle is being studied when they enter. Each semester, freshmen and sophomores take a writing course in which they prepare one paper each week on a topic related to the Humanities course. Some of the class meetings are used for oral presentation of those papers and for practice in writing and editing.

All students must study Latin or Greek in formal credit courses. They thereby have the opportunity to read in the original language texts they may study in the Humanities courses, so that they develop a sense of the texture and nuances of language not always obvious in translations. All students take six hours of mathematics and six hours of science. These requirements introduce students to dimensions of reality best understood through nonverbal means, enabling them to think in a way that transcends the senses. Of primary importance are the philosophical implications of modern mathematics and science. These matters are also taken up in the Humanities sequence. Two required courses in theology consider specifically the significance of Revelation as it is reflected on in the long tradition of that discipline.

The curriculum is the center of the solution; it must be the same for all students, but designed for the best—not in its complexity but in its imaginative scope and profundity. — D. Cowan