The university “Core Curriculum” (not to be confused with the “Common Core” K12 Curriculum) is a set of courses required by all undergraduates, regardless of their major. The purpose is to ensure that students are exposed to texts and issues considered essential to a broad education, and to foster community through common reading and discussion. A corpus of essential readings (“great works” or “foundational texts”) has a long history in liberal arts education. Most universities today have some form of Core Curriculum, but a 2010 ACTA report concluded that “by and large, higher education has abandoned a coherent content-rich general education curriculum”. The institutions surveyed included several major Catholic Universities.
For Catholic Universities, the Core Curriculum has the additional function of familiarizing students with the Catholic intellectual tradition and issues related to it. In addition to the issues often accompanying a Core Curriculum (e.g. who should oversee it, what should be taught, who should teach it, how much freedom should individual faculty have in assigning readings, how should “regular” faculty teaching in the Core be compensated, and where will the money come from) there is the challenge of balancing a “traditional” Catholic education with a “modern” global and inclusive perspective.