Core Mission
The LMU Core is a series of 13 courses across three tiers that students typically complete over a four-year period to progress successfully towards their degrees. Depending on a student’s program of study, some are required to take a different combination of courses than most students. But the LMU Core does so much more than just offering a common intellectual experience to our community of learners.
The Core encourages students to value learning and to carry that love of learning into their future lives. Valuing learning has two key components: a distinctively Catholic, humanistic vision of intellectual inquiry as well as the cultivation of particular skills. Both are necessary for students to be thoughtful, critical, and engaged citizens of the world.
The Core educates and values the whole person. The LMU University Core therefore emphasizes the formation of students as whole persons, integrated in thinking, feeling, and action. As such, the Core includes intellectual, creative/artistic, and moral development. The Core invites students to analyze their relationship to others, to the world, and to God. The Core serves faith by bringing students to a critical and appreciative understanding of religious traditions, and to see the search for God as intrinsic to the human condition.
The Core recognizes LMU’s special role in fostering discerning and active members of diverse communities—local and global. The Core includes the study of ethical theories and moral development,
through which students come to recognize the value of acting rightly and using knowledge mindfully in the promotion of justice.
Most significantly perhaps, the LMU Core is NOT a checklist. It is a roadmap which highlights points of interest for students to explore continually during their academic journey at the university. Students can take courses in their major to fulfill Core requirements or they can venture as far afield as they wish to in search of intellectual stimulation. The Core recognizes that each student has a distinct academic journey and accommodates every single one of their pathways through its expansive course offerings. The LMU Core literally and figuratively strengthens a student’s Core: by building a strong academic foundation, allowing intellectual explorations, and integrating their academic experience in service of the common good. The LMU Core is a path to growth. Come Strengthen your Core!
Learning Outcomes
The University Core Curriculum provides a shared intellectual foundation for every undergraduate student at LMU, and fosters a love of learning that students can carry into their future lives. Through the Core, students will:
- Demonstrate foundational skills in writing, speaking, information literacy, and quantitative and analytical reasoning.
- Acquire knowledge from the primary disciplines of a liberal education in the Ignatian tradition and guided by our sponsoring communities: The Society of Jesus, the Religious of the Sacred Heart of Mary, and the Sisters of St. Joseph of Orange.
- Connect course themes to issues of concern in the contemporary world.
- Engage fundamental questions of faith and justice.
- Construct arguments using evidence, logic, creativity, and critical thinking.
- Integrate skills gained in the course of study in preparation for social justice work in diverse local and/or global contexts.
