"Common Texts" refers to a collection of works chosen by Saint Vincent College faculty to be read in a variety of courses. By approaching a common text from multiple points of view, students can gain fuller insight into the ways ideas and theories are developed and interpreted. The Common Texts Program thus provides a measure of coherence among courses offered by the various academic departments, as well as among courses for majors and non-majors.
THE TEXTS:
In most years of the project, the group of "Common Texts" has numbered from about five to seven texts.
Texts selected for the project are to be "classic" texts; that is, texts that are significant and which embody or have shaped some of the important ideas of our society (although they need not necessarily be products of our society). Although this definition of "classic" is not intended to mean "ancient," it does pretty much rule out contemporary texts, however popular they may be.
As a Saint Vincent student, you can look forward to benefiting from the Common Texts Project in a number of ways. Through the program, the college sponsors at least one activity or event for students each semester, to help heighten the intellectual atmosphere by providing students with a common base of discussion for conversation outside of class.
Also, Saint Vincent teachers assign texts in a variety of courses in the hope that you will read a few of the texts in more than one course in a given semester, and also will encounter a few of the texts more than once during your four years in college. The strategy is to enhance and enrich your reading skills and enjoyment, and to enable you to discover common ground and to make important distinctions among various academic disciplines. With a group of texts studied in common, faculty and students may engage in lecture or discussion referring to information and perspectives already known and analyzed.
Finally, the Common Texts Program promotes dialogue among faculty by providing a regular forum, both in a Summer Seminar and throughout each academic year, for discussion of books, content, and ideas--opportunities for faculty to learn from each other, as students will be learning from them. The Program encourages faculty to improve instruction and student learning, to learn more about other academic disciplines, and to work together in interdisciplinary ways.
ACTIVITIES AND EVENTS FOR STUDENTS:
Original funding for the Common Texts Project was a three-year grant from the NEH (National Endowment for the Humanities), the largest block grant awarded to a liberal arts college in that year. Funding supported, among other things, a one or two day campus visit by a "Master Scholar" each semester of the second and third year of the grant. Master Scholars held a faculty seminar, visited some classes, and gave a lecture for students and faculty which was open to the general public. The four Master Scholars who visited focused on Genesis, Rousseau’s Social Contract, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Japanese film and literature. Since then, the Common Text Project has sponsored several public lectures by visiting scholars.
The Project aims to hold at least one event or promote at least one event or activity per semester for students in Common Texts Courses. To that end, in various semesters over the past ten years or so, Common Texts faculty have set up such activities as classroom exchanges, freshman orientation activities, panel discussions, student discussions. Sometimes, these activities or events have reached beyond the group of Common Texts faculty. Most recently, the Common Texts faculty initiated and co-sponsored with the student club The Dream-Keepers a day of memorial in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr.; other Faculty were invited to participate in using the King texts in their classes and in attending or participating in the evening program. One semester a number of years ago--the semester of the twentieth anniversary of the first Earth Day-- the Common Texts Faculty declared the Spring semester to be "The Environment Semester." A special interdisciplinary course centered on readings from all disciplines regarding ecology. All Common Texts Faculty participated, including Biology, Chemistry, Philosophy, Religion, Business and Psychology professors. Also, several special events were held during the semester to increase environmental awareness. Other student activities have included panel discussions, dinner speakers, a poetry and art contest, and class poster presentations.