ENCHIRIDION HANDBOOK

Enchiridion Online Version > 2004-2005 > Introduction

The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Rev. Kail C. Ellis, O.S.A., Ph.D. - Dean
Robert DeVos, Ph.D.  - Associate Dean
John Doody, Ph.D.  - Associate Dean for Core Curriculum
Edwin L. Goff, Ph.D. - Associate Dean for Honors Program
& Undergraduate Grants & Awards
Catherine M. Hill, Ed.D.  - Associate Dean
Mario J. D’Ignazio, M.Ed. - Assistant Dean
 

History
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences of Villanova University was founded by the Augustinian Order in 1842. The College traces its origins to old St. Augustine’s Church in Philadelphia, which the Augustinians founded in 1796, and to its parish school, St. Augustine’s Academy, established in 1811.

In 1842 the Augustinians purchased “Belle Air,” the country estate of John Rudolph, a Revolutionary War officer and Philadelphia merchant. There they established the “Augustinian College of Villanova,” under the patronage of St. Thomas of Villanova, a sixteenth-century Augustinian educator and Bishop of Valencia, Spain. Eventually the College came to be known as Villanova and gave its name to the town which grew up around it.

Classes for the new college began on September 18, 1843 when thirteen students embarked on a traditional liberal arts curriculum. At the outset, however, difficulties plagued the new college. The anti-Catholic “Know Nothing” riots in Philadelphia in 1844 resulted in the burning of St. Augustine’s Church. The need to rebuild the church and maintain the new college created a financial crisis for the Order. As a result, the College closed its doors on February 20, 1845. It was able to reopen in September, 1846, with a student population of twenty-four; the first commencement took place on July 21, 1847. The following year, on March 10, 1848, the Governor of Pennsylvania, Francis R. Shunk, signed the Act of Legislature incorporating the College.

In 1857, Villanova College closed for a second time. Demands on the services of priests through the expansion of parishes in the area created staffing problems for the Augustinians, while the “Panic of 1857” brought on hard economic times. The onslaught of the Civil War in 1860 affected student enrollment and the College was not reopened until September, 1865. In the years that followed, the College prospered, increasing its student population and adding significantly to its physical facilities.

Although in the first fifty years of its existence the College concentrated exclusively on the liberal arts, it nevertheless remained open to the changes in the curriculum which were required to meet the needs of the time and the demands for specialization.

Today, the College continues to offer a variety of educational programs which are aimed at the total growth of the individual, and which prepare students for viable careers. Graduates of the College have taken their place in almost every field of endeavor, serving in education, business, government, law, medicine and research, where they make vital contributions to the communities and the world in which they live.

Objectives
The College of Liberal Arts and Sciences exists to provide an atmosphere of responsible learning to a varied group of students who are called to intellectual, moral and professional leadership. To fulfill these goals, the College seeks to promote intellectual curiosity and rigor within the university, to instill the fundamentals of critical insight, mature judgment and independent thinking, and to awaken in its students a sense of the importance of values and the moral responsibility of caring for others and working for the betterment of society.

Villanova has always openly and proudly declared that it is a Catholic institution of higher learning. The University maintains a strong respect for the beliefs of its diverse community of faculty, students, and staff. In keeping with its central place in a Catholic University, the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences has a special commitment to the Christian belief that creation is an expression of the divine truth through the redemptive life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, the incarnate Word of God. It also seeks to provide a Christian intellectual and moral environment, and believes that it is the common right of all to participate in creation, to seek truth and to apply such truth attained to protect and enrich personal and communal life.

Villanova’s special Augustinian heritage enables the College to draw upon the dynamic legacy of St. Augustine whose passionate pursuit of wisdom, understood through the metaphor of one heart and one mind, inspires its own quest for knowledge in open, intelligent, responsible and mutually respectful interaction of points of view. This legacy is classically illustrated by the Augustinian Order’s impact on the medieval universities, its distinguished cultivation of Renaissance art, and it’s fostering of the scientific discoveries of Gregor Mendel. It is further expressed in the conviction that all authentic human wisdom is ultimately in harmony with Divine Wisdom, and it invites collaboration with other Christians and peoples of other traditions who might share at least the general features and dynamics of this Augustinian vision.

In light of this legacy, the College has developed a diversified academic program and a core curriculum which provide students with a scale of well-defined universal values that equips them to be wise critics of the society in which they live, and which sustains a moral base and social consciousness that transcends economic barriers and questions of race, gender and creed.

Academic Mission
The academic mission of the College is intimately connected with its Core Curriculum. The courses in the Core Curriculum treat a broad range of disciplines from a variety of approaches; at the same time, the Core strives to ensure depth of study and intellectual sophistication while recognizing that learning implies different modes of inquiry.

The objectives of the Core are to:
a. Achieve a synthesis of knowledge that provides a basis for informed judgment, not simply “fact finding”.

b. Promote literacy as a foundation for intelligent discourse and the articulation of informed views.

c. Advance culture in a broad sense, educating students to understand and to appreciate the interrelated patterns of customary beliefs and practices, social forms, aesthetics, and material traits that act to define a culture and its position within a larger historical and intellectual framework. The educational program does not simply look to the past, but acknowledges that culture is vibrant and continuously redefined.

d. Challenge students to understand that the present is recognizably formed from past influences and that in order to assess our culture and arrive at a view of its future, students must be trained to scrutinize and bring into perspective the relationship of the present culture with that of the past.

e. Prepare students to become active participants within society, to engage in the process of informed political debate, to discover the impact of new technologies, and to encourage an understanding and appreciation of the diversity of cultures and experiences, a respect for the individual, and the development of a multicultural and international perspective.

f. Encourage personal development in preparing students to regard themselves as citizens living in a democratic society, as belonging to a world community, replete with communal responsibilities.

Mission To Its Students, Faculty and Staff
The College strongly adheres to the principles of the University Mission Statement which commits Villanova to “developing and sustaining an academic environment in which the potentialities of its members may be realized.” In so doing, the College is guided by the teachings of Vatican II which emphasized that “the human spirit must be cultivated in such a way that there results a growth in its ability to wonder, to understand, to contemplate, to make personal judgments, and to develop a religious, moral, and social sense” (Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 59).

In order to fulfill its academic mission of transmitting, pursuing and discovering knowledge, the College commits itself to the hiring and retaining of outstanding teacher-scholars and dedicated staff personnel whose academic and professional interests will develop and foster the goals of the University’s Mission Statement. In hiring faculty and staff personnel, the College further commits itself to the goal of maintaining a richness of diversity by actively recruiting women and minorities. In all hiring strategies and decisions, the College strives to utilize procedures that will reliably determine the best qualified applicants.

While the College is committed to maintaining its Catholic identity, it does not seek a particular religious affiliation within its personnel. Rather, as formulated in the University’s Mission Statement, it asks that all respect its “attempts to develop an environment in which students, faculty and staff may experience a Christian intellectual and moral perspective,” and have a willingness to enter into the conversation that gives its mission life and character.

The College is strongly committed to academic freedom which makes open discussion and inquiry possible. It believes that open discussion among scholars and students is a self-correcting process that is intrinsic to academic freedom and that this process is in accord with responsible freedom, a central value of the Christian tradition, and of the thought of St. Augustine, the great theologian of Christian freedom.

The College seeks to encourage and equitably reward the valuable performance of its faculty and staff by offering competitive salaries and by making available opportunities which will enhance their professional development. It also seeks to promote a congenial work environment that is conducive to self-motivation. In recruiting students, the College seeks to ensure the best applicant pool possible. It strives to retain students by offering excellent academic programs and by providing them with quality campus activities.

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