The Curriculum

Quite unabashedly, the curriculum at the University of Dallas is based on the supposition that truth and virtue exist and are the proper objects of search in an education.

The curriculum further supposes that this search is best pursued through an acquisition of philosophical and theological principles and has for its analogical field a vast body of great literature—supplemented by a survey of the sweep of history and an introduction to the political and economic principles of society. An understanding of these subjects, along with an introduction to the quantitative and scientific world view and the mastery of a language, is expected to form a comprehensive and coherent experience which, in effect, governs the intellect of a student in a manner which develops independence of thought in its most effective mode. Every student builds his or her intellectual structure on the core curriculum and is bolstered by the fact that this experience is shared with the entire community of fellow students. The student then goes on to pursue a chosen major discipline, reaching—according to this theory of education— a level of maturity and competency in the discipline that could not have been attained in the absence of a broad and general foundation.

Discovering and transmitting the wisdom of the Western tradition is an undertaking inseparable from the task of preserving language. The university acknowledges an obligation, at once professional, civic and spiritual, to encourage in its students a respect for language and to train young men and women to write and speak with directness, precision, vigor and color.