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Thomas
International is a project of cultural
renewal that seeks to bring the classical and Christian
intellectual traditions to bear on contemporary intellectual
life, initially through several research institutes, and
eventually through the establishment of an international
university with its main campus in the United States.
A key conviction
of this project and university is that knowledge is an
integrated whole, with sound philosophy and theology providing
guiding principles to other disciplines. This approach offers
an alternative to the relativism and even scepticism about
genuine knowledge of the human good that characterizes
contemporary university life, and the dis-integration of
academic life into largely autonomous specializations.
Current plans call for
the university to begin in the fall of 2011 with a
college liberal arts program – in which students will have the
opportunity to pursue some of their studies in Italy (in a
future Thomas International university campus there) – and with
a graduate program in philosophy. Within a few years, it will
add another graduate program in an area yet to be determined.
Our ultimate goal is a university that has graduate programs in
all the major fields of study, as well as graduate professional
schools.
The
College of
Liberal Studies will be the framework
for all the undergraduate programs, and all students will follow
an ample core curriculum, since one of the goals of a liberal
arts education is to equip people with the intellectual
capacities needed to thrive in any area of study. As other
undergraduate pre-professional programs are added, e.g.,
communications and business, they will be integrated into the
College as programs rather than being established as
free-standing colleges (which tend to drift from, and exist in
tension with, liberal education). Care will be taken that even
the eventual post-graduate professional schools, such as law,
business, and medicine, retain important “liberal” components,
rather than focusing only on vocational preparation narrowly
understood. The ultimate key to maintaining the unity of the
university will be hiring liberally-educated people in all
fields.
The
university will combine a commitment
to classical moral and spiritual ideals with a commitment to
academic excellence and to active participation in contemporary
intellectual and cultural reflection and discussion. Our desire
to “engage” the culture leads us to emphasize excellent
scholarship more than many other schools that are solidly rooted
in the Thomistic intellectual tradition. This excellence
consists especially in meeting high secular standards of
scholarship implicit in the various disciplines (e.g., much of
it will be publishable in peer-reviewed journals) – although, of
course, it will be willing to challenge contemporary
disciplinary standards where they are defective, not just on
“external” religious grounds, but on the basis of the
discipline’s own principles.
So what will make us
different is especially the combination of an
intellectual framework that reflects the harmony between
scholarship and religious truth and a commitment to scholarly
excellence that stands on its own, without relying on religion
for validation. This approach will be reflected in the active
participation of our faculty (and students) in contemporary
intellectual discussions. Our hope is that this distinction will
be heightened by beginning with a core of scholars who are
already well-established in their secular disciplines.
A second
area of distinctiveness will be our
approach to university teaching. Mass university education
today makes it difficult for students to have the kind of
tutorial (one-on-one) work that has been an essential component
of classical universities such as Oxford, at their best. Our
hope is to work out a way of integrating graduate students into
the academic life of student residences in a way that will
provide first-year undergraduates with regular, one-on-one work
on their reading and writing, and then continue this personal
attention in upper-division classes with regular faculty.
During
2006-2007, we have been discussing the location
of the university with local officials and supporters in several
areas of the country, and our hope is to make a decision about
the location by the end of this year (2007). The Ralph McInerny
Center for Thomistic Studies would re-locate to this area in the
summer of 2008, and our current plans call for it to expand over
the next three years, providing the core of faculty for the
university to begin in the fall of 2011.
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