The program of study at Monmouth College is a distinctive answer to these questions. We respond with a curriculum that fosters personal growth and prepares our students for professional success in competitive and changing environments. We also ask ourselves and our students to respond to an essential paradox of being in the world: namely that we achieve the greatest measure of individual freedom, the fullest realization of our individual humanity in the larger context of social responsibilities.

Our curriculum is both intentional and integrated in its several parts: Foundation Skills, Integrated Studies, Area Studies, the Major, and Electives. Although each of these elements has its specific purpose, together they provide a structure that guides students toward the goals of a liberal education: to think critically, to communicate effectively, to appreciate the varieties of human experience and achievement, to articulate and develop ethical values, to pursue expertise in a discipline, and to discover patterns of meaning across disciplines.

The Semester Calendar
The academic year at Monmouth is organized into two semesters. In each semester, students ordinarily take 15 to 16 credits. The first semester begins in late August, ending before the Christmas holidays. The second semester begins in late January, ending in mid-May. Depending on the credit value of each course, students might anticipate taking between four and six courses each semester. Most courses meet for three 50-minute periods or two 75-minute periods a week, with laboratory or studio courses having additional sessions. Individual courses are worth one to eight semester hours.

The General Education Program
One of the qualities that has long made Monmouth College distinctive is its commitment to a four-year general education program. General Education provides the larger context of knowledge and human experience, raises questions of meaning and value, and provides a basis for judging the purposes and methods of particular disciplines. General Education commits undergraduates and the entire campus to life-long learning through course work that promotes purposeful inquiry into those activities, forms, and institutions that define our humanity and that identify significant areas of cultural agreement and difference among us. The components of our General Education program are Foundation Skills, Integrated Studies, and Area Studies.

I. Foundation Skills
Throughout a student’s academic career – indeed, throughout a person’s whole life – effective communication and quantitative literacy are essential tools for analysis and understanding. A Monmouth College education begins with Foundations Skills, where language and reasoning are intentionally integrated through Communication Across the Curriculum (CAC) and Quantitative Reasoning Across the Curriculum (QAC) programs. The goals of such integration are comprehensive, involving instruction, reinforcement, and elaboration across the curriculum, from Integrated Studies general education courses to classical and modern foreign languages to major courses. Always before us, then, is the understanding that skills in writing and reading, speaking, listening, and quantification, underwrite academic success and successful personal and professional lives. Students begin with CATA 101, Fundamentals of Communication, and ENGL 110, Composition and Argument, during the first year.

II. Integrated Studies
Introduction to Liberal Arts. (INTG 101)
Our Integrated Studies program begins with Introduction to Liberal Arts. We meet first-year students in the midst of the transition between high school and college. Guided by an instructor who is professor, mentor, and the students’ academic advisor, the course addresses the purposes of liberal and collegiate education by examining a single topic or theme from a variety of disciplinary perspectives. The aim is to identify and celebrate the liberal arts as a community of learners excited by the informed exchange of ideas. Although all sections share common objectives, foundation skills goals, common core readings, and a common theme, each section is enhanced by the instructor’s distinctive emphasis, as indicated by course subtitles.

Students meet three times a week with a faculty seminar leader, and all seminar groups meet together on Tuesday at 11 A.M. for a colloquium, lecture, or other presentation. Students earn four semester hours of credit for the seminar.

Global Perspectives
Once our students have found their new place in the world of higher education, we ask them in the second year to turn attention to their place in the larger world: to investigate communities, societies, political systems, and civilizations other than their own. How are we to understand a complex and changing world and its peoples, where events unfold and are chronicled with ever-increasing speed? Global Perspectives addresses this question by highlighting the influence and importance of cultural differences and by asking students to understand culture as a lens through which we view the world. Inherent in this process is fostering critical thinking about the students’ own place in that world, as well as garnering knowledge about world political economy, about global demographics, and about the differences between developed and developing nations. Like Introduction to Liberal Arts, Global Perspectives shares common readings and emphasizes communication skills introduced in the first year.

Reflections
The turn outward represented by Global Perspectives is balanced in Reflections by a turn inward to consideration of personal values. As in Global Perspectives we ask students in Reflections courses to analyze familiar and unfamiliar systems of thought and belief, but this time in order to explore their own and others’ ideas about the ultimate meaning and purposes of our lives. Because inquiry about human values can occur in a variety of disciplinary contexts, our students may choose in their third year from a menu of courses representing philosophical, religious, artistic, and scientific perspectives. Yet each course in its own way addresses foundational questions, linking provisional answers to descriptions of ethical conduct and an examined life.

Citizenship
By the time students are seniors, they have been asked in Integrated Studies courses to develop some understanding of their places in college, their places in the world, and their own beliefs and values. The senior capstone course, Citizenship, challenges students to move past study and contemplation to conscientious action. Citizenship courses, chosen from a menu of offerings, typically take an interdisciplinary approach to understanding important social issues. Then students are called upon to address those issues variously as citizens of community, nation, and world. Individual and group projects may involve position papers, social or political policy proposals, development of and participation in service projects, or other experiential learning projects.

III. Area Studies
This component of General Education serves two essential goals of liberal education, supplying breadth of basic knowledge in important fields of study, and providing a basis for judging the purposes and methods of our four divisions of knowledge: Foreign Languages, the Arts, the Sciences, and the Human Societies.

Foreign Languages
Important to understanding one’s own culture is being able to step outside of it, even for the duration of a course. Learning another language requires students to understand and communicate in new patterns of thought, on terms other than their own. Studying a foreign language is experiential learning, requiring students to explore the linguistic and cultural richness of a world beyond their own. To satisfy the Foreign Language requirement, students must be proficient at the 102 level of language study, in other words at the level commensurate with one year of college-level study. International students whose native language is other than English meet the Foreign Language requirements by demonstrating their competency in English, which is for them a foreign language.

Monmouth College courses satisfying this requirement are:

• FREN 101-102 (Elementary)
• GERM 101-102 (Elementary)
• GREK 101-102 (Elementary) or GREK 101-212 (Elementary-Biblical)
• JAPN 101-102 (Elementary)
• LATN 101-102 (Elementary)
• SPAN 101-102 (Elementary)

The Arts
Literature, music, art, and theater are among the greatest accomplishments of the human imagination and spirit. Human beings have found in the arts ways to shape and give order to experience, to express their most private feelings, to celebrate life, and to affirm human community. The arts transmit to us the wealth of the past and give promise of transmitting the best of the present to the future. We believe that to value the arts fully, students must both appreciate historic and formal achievements and participate in the creative processes; thus, students will take one 3-hour semester course in “Appreciation” and two credits in “Participation,” ideally before the end of the junior year.

The Sciences
Like the Arts, Science represents imaginative achievement: a systematic method and an organized body of knowledge about our physical universe and its life forms. Study in the sciences further defines the extent to which discovery and invention have shaped human identity, human choices, human societies, and changed our relationship to Nature. The Area Studies requirement in the Sciences is for two courses, one under the category of “Physical Sciences” and the other under “Life Sciences.” Each course has a laboratory experience, replicating the art requirement’s emphasis on the importance of participation in the learning process.

Human Societies
The final component of Area Studies recognizes that because we are social beings, human institutions shape our lives. To a considerable extent, society and culture influence our ideas, describe and delimit our choices, and deepen and constrain our understandings of individuality and community. Human Societies courses consider the nature and extent of institutional influences on our lives. In conjunction with the first three Integrated Studies courses, the menu of Human Societies courses provides understanding of personal and societal issues taken up later in the capstone Citizenship course. (Refer to pp. 17 for the list of courses that meet this requirement.)

IV. The Major
The Major Program provides students with more comprehensive study of a particular
discipline, both its methods and its information. Depth, rigor, and coherence are the keynotes
of major study. Understanding the process and methods whereby disciplinary knowledge is
discovered, developed, and refined over time enables students to appreciate that current generations of theorists and practitioners stand on the shoulders of those who have gone before. The major may or may not be directly linked to the career a student intends to follow, but it should reflect a student’s desire to explore a discipline comprehensively, because such exploration and knowledge are themselves profoundly important. A further goal of the major is to prepare students for careers and graduate study.

Departmental Major
Students may take a major program in a single discipline, fulfilling the requirements set by the department. The departmental major provides an appropriate culminating experience during the senior year: a special seminar, a thesis, or an independent study project. Each department publishes a description of the purposes and scope of the major program in its discipline(s), identifying the courses that are required including courses intensive in speaking, writing, and quantitative skills development. No more than forty semester hours may be required in a discipline; students may take additional courses in the discipline as electives, but they may count no more than 50 hours in a single discipline toward the 124 required for a degree. In addition, students may count no more than 62 hours in a single department.

Topical Major
The topical major provides a unique opportunity for the student who wants to pursue in depth an interest area that bridges the subject area of several departments. The student’s advisor plays an important role in helping to plan a topical major. The topical major consists of at least 36 semester hours, 18 of them at the 300 or 400 level. One of these courses must be designated as the culminating experience. The Admissions and Academic Status Committee must approve the proposed set of courses and formally appoint the advisor who will guide the student. Requests for approval of a topical major must be filed at least three semesters before the student’s graduation.

V. ELECTIVE COURSES
Beyond the General Education and Major requirements, students have opportunities to take courses that may enhance and augment major study or simply satisfy curiosity in another area of interest. Elective courses provide opportunities for enrichment and experimentation. Topics and instructors that students would not otherwise encounter may spark a life-long hobby, keen a passionate interest, dedicate a life to volunteerism, or even result in a change in career plans.

Our four-year General Education program— comprised of Foundation Skills, Integrated Studies, and Area Studies—informs and references Major and Elective course choices. Taken altogether they represent a distinctive, intentional, and integrated liberal arts curriculum, an education that challenges students to life-long learning, personal achievement and leadership, citizenship, and service. Requirements for the Degree.

In summary form, these are the requirements for the degree:

1. Four years of academic work in which the student earns at least 124 semester hours of credit. An average of C (2.00) or higher must be obtained in course work taken at Monmouth College. The senior residency requirement stipulates that after attaining senior status (90 semester hours), at least 27 semester hours of the remaining credits required for the degree must be granted by the College.

2. Completion of all general education requirements with a passing grade. (Transfer students who enter Monmouth College with 24 or more semester hours of credit will be exempt from taking INTG 101.)

3. Completion of a major program with at least a C- grade in all courses required for the major and an overall C average (2.0) in those courses. (Certain majors have stricter requirements. Read through the departmental descriptions carefully.) Although minors are not required, in order to complete a minor, the grade point average of courses in the minor program must be at least a 2.0 with no grades below C-.

4. Payment of all current financial obligations to the College.

Application for Degree
Candidates for the Bachelor of Arts degree must make formal application to the Registrar one year (2 full semesters) in advance of their expected graduation.

Assessment at Monmouth College
Monmouth College is actively engaged in assessing student learning. The ultimate goal of
assessment is to improve the education students receive at Monmouth College by evaluating the
educational program. Specifically, assessment attempts to identify what the college wants students to learn, to determine how well students are learning what they need, and to help students learn more effectively.
Assessment activities are overseen by the Assessment Committee. Some of these activities are carried out in the classroom, such as standardized testing and transcript reflection. Other assessment activities are carried out after graduation through alumni surveys. Yet other activities are embedded in the day-to-day activities of class work. Occasionally, students may be requested to participate in assessment activities outside of their normal class work. The data collected from these activities culminate in a five-year assessment report for each department and program at Monmouth College.

General Education Course Requirements
Courses that satisfy the requirements of the general education program are designated by the faculty. In addition to the courses listed, some courses that vary in content satisfy requirements when particular topics are offered. Such courses are listed in semester course schedules.

I. FOUNDATION SKILLS
(a) One course in speech that deals with communication theory and provides practice in spoken English, taken in the freshman year: CATA 101, Fundamentals of Communication.
(b) One course that deals with the metaphorical use of language and provides experience in writing, taken in the freshman year: ENGL 110, Composition and Argument.

II. INTEGRATED STUDIES
1. INTG 101. Introduction to Liberal Arts.

2. Global Perspectives. (Choose from the menu of course offerings. Some courses are still under development and will be added as Global Perspectives offerings.)
INTG 201. Global Perspectives: World Impact of East Asian Science.
INTG 202. Global Perspectives: World Drama.
INTG 203. Global Perspectives: Food.
INTG 204. Global Perspectives: The Environment.
INTG 205. Global Perspectives: Communication in Global Contexts.
INTG 207. Global Perspectives: Terrorism.
INTG 208. Global Perspectives: Work and Leisure.INTG 209. Global Perspectives: Ethnic Conflict.
INTG 210. Global Perspectives: Security in the Age of Globalization.

3. INTG 3xx. Reflections (Choose from menu of course offerings which are still under development.)
INTG 301. Reflections: Spirit and Story.
INTG 302. Reflections: The Pursuit of Well-Being.
INTG 303. Reflections: Bodies, Nature, Power.
INTG 304. Reflections: Beyond Belief.
INTG 305. Reflections: Ancient Religious Reflections.
INTG 306. Reflections: The Psychological Aspects of Civil Rights Issues.
INTG 307. Reflections: Friends, Neighbors, Lovers, Enemies.

4. INTG 4xx. Citizenship (Choose from menu of course offerings which are still under development.)

III. AREA STUDIES
Foreign Languages
Competence in a foreign language at the level of the 102 course, in other words at the level commensurate with one year of college-level study. (Taken in the freshman or sophomore year.)

FREN 101-102. Elementary.
GERM 101-102. Elementary.
GREK 101-102. Elementary.
or GREK 101-212. Elementary-Biblical.
LATN 101-102. Elementary.
JAPN 101-102. Elementary.
SPAN 101-102. Elementary.

The Arts
Beauty and Meaning in Works of Art.
(Five semester hours taken before the end of the junior year.)

(a) One course emphasizing appreciation and interpretation:
ARTD 200. Introduction to the History of Art: Prehistoric Through Medieval
ARTD 201. Art History Survey: Renaissance Through Modern.
ARTD 306. Women, Art, and Feminism.
CLAS 210. Ancient Literature.
CLAS 230. Classical Mythology.
CATA 171. Introduction to Theater and Cinema Appreciation.
CATA 273. The Classical Theater.
CATA 275. The Modern Theater.
ENGL 180. Intro to Literature. Special Topics.
ENGL 240. Russian Literature of the 19th Century.
HIST 306. The Enlightenment.
HIST 307. Modernism.
HIST 308. 19th Century Arts and Letters.
HIST 309. Russian Cultural History.
MUSI 101. Introduction to Music.
MUSI 203. Evolution of Jazz.
MUSI 205. History of American Music.
MUSI 209. World Music.
PHIL 315. Aesthetics.

(b) Two semester hours emphasizing participation in the creative process:
ARTD 101. Methods and Materials.
ARTD 121. Drawing I.
ARTD 123. Sculpture I.
ARTD 124. Ceramics I.
ARTD 142. Painting I.
ARTD 236. Photography.
CATA 127. Theater Arts: Workshops.
CATA 173. Introduction to Technical Theater.
CATA 175. Beginning Acting.
ENGL 210. Creative Writing.
MUSI 131. Jazz Band.
MUSI 134. Glee Club.
MUSI 145/146. Piano.
MUSI 151/152. Voice.
MUSI 153/154. Guitar.
MUSI 155/156. Strings.
MUSI 161/162. Woodwinds.
MUSI 165/166. Brass.
MUSI 171/172. Percussion.
MUSI 181. Chorale.
MUSI 182. Instrumental Chamber Music/Orchestra.
MUSI 184. Chapel Choir.MUSI 185. Winds.
MUSI 186. Pipes and Drums.
MUSI 187. Percussion Ensemble.
MUSI 189. Monmouth College Band.

The Sciences
The Physical Universe and Its Life Forms.
(Two courses taken before the end of the junior year.)

(a) One course with laboratory in chemistry or physics:
CHEM 100. Chemistry: A Cultural Approach
CHEM 130. Organic Chemistry I. (Satisfies requirement of students in a program in health careers and for students who complete the chemistry sequence through CHEM 220.)
PHYS 103. Astronomy.
PHYS 130. Introduction to Physics I.
PHYS 132. Introduction to Physics II.

(b) One course with laboratory in biology or psychology:
BIOL 101. Life on Earth. (Recommended for non-majors.)
BIOL 111. General Zoology.
BIOL 112. General Botany.
BIOL 201. Field Botany.
PSYC 101. Introduction to Psychology.

Human Societies
(One course taken before the end of the Junior year.)

ANTH 103. Introduction to Anthropology.
BUSI 105. The Evolution of Commerce.
CLAS 211. History of Greece.
CLAS 212. History of Rome.
CLAS 240. Ancient Society.
ECON 200. Principles of Economics.
HIST 110. American History 1492-1750.
HIST 111. United States History 1750-1900.
HIST 112. United States History 1900-Present.
POLS 103. American Politics.
POLS 200. Introduction to Comparative Politics.
POLS 270. Global Affairs.
PSYC 282. Cultural Psychology.
SOCI 101. Introduction to Sociology.
SOCI 102. Social Problems.
WOST 201. Introduction to Women’s Studies.

IMPORTANT DATES