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Undergraduate Core Curriculum

Core Classes

New Xavier students registering for classes: Click the blue button to view First-Year Seminar and Core class options ...

FYS and Core Classes

Courses for the new core are being approved on an ongoing basis. Check in here to view a not-necessarily comprehensive but very representative list. Or read an overview of core requirements in the Core Guide.

The vision of the core curriculum is realized through a suite of courses that work together to guide students' intellectual, spiritual and moral development. There are many paths students may walk to navigate the core, since most requirements can be met by a wide breadth of courses.

First-Year Experience

Ethics/Religion and Society (E/RS)

Consistent with the mission of Xavier University as a Jesuit, Catholic university rooted in the liberal arts tradition, the E/RS 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.

Liberal Arts Perspectives

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, disciplines not directed merely to the securing of provisions necessary for life, but aimed at perfecting the highest and most specifically human abilities. It will free you by emphasizing not only knowledge, but the abilities necessary to analyze it meaningfully, to organize and integrate it, to break out into new areas and acquire new knowledge. It will free you from the conflict that comes from not having an integrated rational and emotional life. Liberal education is the beginning of a lifelong personal integration, which leads to practical, wise and sensitive action in the world.

Liberal Arts Electives

Cultural Understanding

The ability to understand our culture as well as others different from our own 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 skills and are therefore required.

  • Diversity Flag options
  • Second Language: choose from American Sign Language, Arabic, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Italian, Latin, Spanish

Skills

The skills of rhetoric and calculation cross all disciplines in their usefulness and importance, and those who can wield these skills 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 their college career. To ensure every student reaches at least a satisfactory level of instruction in these areas, the following courses are required as part of the Core:

 

Faculty and Staff

Core Guide

Details on Core Classes

Vision

Goals and Objectives