Christopher Newport University academic programs will prepare students to lead lives of significance and responsibility in a free, democratic society. The University anchors its curriculum in the principles of liberal learning. Its curricular design sets high standards for academic achievement and teaching excellence. In the pursuit of excellence, the curriculum provides students complex and challenging material, supported by learning across the disciplines and dedicated to the ideals of scholarship, leadership and service.

Our academic programs will create independent learners prepared intellectually and practically to understand the world. The university curriculum values the historical, philosophical, and scientific traditions that have shaped the world. Its across the disciplines structure promotes the transformation of knowledge and belief into action, stimulates the creative process and cultivates imagination. Educated in the liberal learning curriculum, students understand the changing quality of knowledge and appreciate interrelations within and among global communities.

University Priority I

A Vital Curriculum
An excellent liberal learning curriculum, providing students a rigorous higher education rooted in the liberal arts and sciences and responding to the values inherent in the University's mission.

Goals and Strategies

• Ensure liberal learning within the core curriculum, across the disciplines and within each major.
• Establish structured intellectual, academic and cultural challenges for each of the four years of undergraduate study.
• Ensure students are literate in diverse areas of knowledge.

• Promote learning that treats knowledge as vibrant and changing.
• Cultivate analytical and integrative thinking within and across the disciplines.
• Construct a framework for the development of problem solving abilities.
• Encourage scholarship across the disciplines.

• Support, reinforce and encourage intellectual curiosity and creativity.
• Provide learning opportunities that cultivate a desire for reading and further inquiry.
• Encourage the wise use of knowledge in the service of human freedom.
• Cultivate and support undergraduate research and public presentations of the findings.
• Promote and foster artistic creativity and public presentations in the fine and performing arts.
• Stimulate a lifelong desire for learning.
• Continue to expand and update the library collections and services in support of student learning.

• Cultivate a curriculum that encourages the development of personal values.
• Encourage responsible leadership.
• Provide opportunities for interpersonal growth and group interaction.
• Foster a lifelong commitment to honorable living and the common good.