Getting to Work
8/3/2008
Most of the summer orientation and registration is over, and we’ll have the largest freshman class in our history. The great part of this growth is that we keep adding new, different, passionate faculty, advisors and staff so that our incredibly small average class size stays where it is (16) and we keep very distinctive quality of having two out of every three classes with under 20 students. New faculty means new programs as well, and this year we’ve added an interdisciplinary major in Neuroscience, a major in Sculpture, and a minor in the Study of Women and Gender, among others.
Even with the growth, we’re still a small school and, compared with the mega-universities with arena-sized courses, we always will be. Small by design.
These aren’t just numbers. They’re part of a philosophy of education that, in the great Dominican tradition, takes a deliberately dialogical approach. Imagine college as an ongoing, deepening and at times exhilarating conversation with a fascinating array of persons, places, texts, objects and events, past and present, so that precisely in and through this free and open interaction comes genuine learning, transformation, and the discovery of your own best self and your life’s true trajectory. Imagine a setting in which you dare to put your convictions and assumptions to the test and see where it takes you/where it takes us, together.
A smaller, friendly, engaging community is required, in order to pull off this kind of teaching and learning, and it’s what we do every day. That’s college, Dominican style.
So catch the spirit of St. Augustine, who wrote that when he was 19 years old, "all my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm" and he "burned with longing – not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly."
What a concept. Being a college student means that your full-time job is to pursue truth, find the joy in study, discover what fascinates you and what your greatest gifts are, so that you can live a life of meaning and purpose, a life not simply to improve your socioeconomic standing, but one that also will turn your gifts outward. Live a life to be proud of because it’s a life that benefits others and not only yourself.
Pursuit of truth gets to be your full-time job in this precious four-year window of opportunity that is college.
Let’s get to work.
Most of the summer orientation and registration is over, and we’ll have the largest freshman class in our history. The great part of this growth is that we keep adding new, different, passionate faculty, advisors and staff so that our incredibly small average class size stays where it is (16) and we keep very distinctive quality of having two out of every three classes with under 20 students. New faculty means new programs as well, and this year we’ve added an interdisciplinary major in Neuroscience, a major in Sculpture, and a minor in the Study of Women and Gender, among others.
Even with the growth, we’re still a small school and, compared with the mega-universities with arena-sized courses, we always will be. Small by design.
These aren’t just numbers. They’re part of a philosophy of education that, in the great Dominican tradition, takes a deliberately dialogical approach. Imagine college as an ongoing, deepening and at times exhilarating conversation with a fascinating array of persons, places, texts, objects and events, past and present, so that precisely in and through this free and open interaction comes genuine learning, transformation, and the discovery of your own best self and your life’s true trajectory. Imagine a setting in which you dare to put your convictions and assumptions to the test and see where it takes you/where it takes us, together.
A smaller, friendly, engaging community is required, in order to pull off this kind of teaching and learning, and it’s what we do every day. That’s college, Dominican style.
So catch the spirit of St. Augustine, who wrote that when he was 19 years old, "all my empty dreams suddenly lost their charm" and he "burned with longing – not simply to admire one or another of the schools of philosophy, but to love wisdom itself, whatever it might be, and to search for it, pursue it, hold it, and embrace it firmly."
What a concept. Being a college student means that your full-time job is to pursue truth, find the joy in study, discover what fascinates you and what your greatest gifts are, so that you can live a life of meaning and purpose, a life not simply to improve your socioeconomic standing, but one that also will turn your gifts outward. Live a life to be proud of because it’s a life that benefits others and not only yourself.
Pursuit of truth gets to be your full-time job in this precious four-year window of opportunity that is college.
Let’s get to work.
