Undergraduate Catalog 2026-2027
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LBL 101 Introduction to the Liberal Arts Credits: (3)
This course serves as an introduction to the nature, scope, and significance of a liberal arts education. Students will be asked to think carefully about enduring questions related to the human experience: What does it mean for an individual, an action, or a community to be just? What does it mean to be free? What economic and social inequalities have helped shape human history and continue to exist today? Students will encounter enduring, transformative texts that have demonstrated a capacity to speak on these issues to many different kinds of people in many different historical and cultural circumstances.
In keeping with the interdisciplinary nature of the liberal arts, students will read enduring texts from a number of different academic areas of study (e.g., history, philosophy, literature, politics, anthropology, psychology, sociology, languages). Students will be asked to make connections between issues and themes covered in the texts and their own experiences. As an introductory course in the liberal arts, students will be introduced to the resources available at the college that will allow them to consider these texts and questions in a way that clarifies for them their educational and career goals.
There are no prerequisites for the course.
SUNY Gen Ed Area(s): DEISJ, Humanities
Designation(s): Liberal Arts
Learning Outcomes
- Apply critical reading and argumentative writing skills through textual analysis of works drawn from multiple disciplines in the liberal arts.
- Identify connections between the contemporary world and various historical periods, issues, and ideas presented in enduring texts in the liberal arts.
- Display an understanding of how issues related to race, class, gender, and ethnicity are evident in enduring texts.
- Apply the principles encountered in the class to social justice action.
- Describe the purpose and benefits of a liberal arts education.
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