Liberal Arts Foundation
Overview

Often abbreviated as the “LAF,” our general education program reflects our core pedagogical mission to provide a broad-based intellectual foundation for life-long learning. It is designed to endow students with the foundational skills for effective learning and scholarship, and challenges them to examine their own values and the values of society. Every student pursuing a Bachelor of Arts or Bachelor of Science degree is required to successfully address appropriate categories of LAF (please refer to the course catalog for complete description and requirement):

Cross-cultural Studies (CC) encourages students to study different cultures, broaden their perspective on the world and deepen their understanding of their own cultural experience.

Creative Process (CP) provides an opportunity for students to explore an expressive medium and to engage in a process of creating an art form.

Dominance and Difference (DD) urges students to challenge assumptions and stereotypes in the contemporary world, and to engage critically with the dominant structure of inequality.

Foreign Language (FL) builds students’ communication skills in a language other than their first language and their understanding of the structure and cultural context of that language.

Human Behavior (HB) focuses on fundamentals of social scientific inquiry, which seeks to further our understanding of social phenomena and provides a context for human judgment.

Humanities exposes students to a variety of subject matters and approaches in three broad areas so that they acquire a comprehensive understanding of humanistic inquiry: History (HH), Literature (HL), and Philosophy (HP).

Mathematics and Science aims to extend students’ knowledge of the physical universe and the foundation of technologies that affect nearly every aspect of our society, through lab science (MS1), mathematics (MS2), and other forms of scientific inquiry (MS3).

State and Economy (SE) forms an intellectual foundation for responsible citizenship by developing students’ ability to understand.

Writing Across the Curriculum develops students’ ability to communicate effectively and clearly in writing, through lower-division (WA) and upper-division (WB) writing requirements.