With a $200,000 grant from the Teagle Foundation, English faculty members Liz Kimball, PhD, and Scott Warnock, PhD, are working with colleagues and students to create a new humanities minor offering a unifying curriculum to all Drexel students that will allow them to have this experience in critical thinking, reading and writing.

Although Drexel is going through an academic transformation, Warnock and Kimball believe that this was a strength of their proposal, not a weakness. It may seem like a tumultuous time to develop a whole new curriculum, but “it’s actually complementary to the changes Drexel is currently undergoing,” they said. They believe that this program works well with Drexel’s call to rethink its curriculum, and that helped them successfully pitch this idea to the Teagle Foundation.

The Teagle Foundation’s mission is to support educational excellence through exposure to liberal arts and civics education. “This style of learning develops students’ critical thinking skills so that they can communicate with civility and clarity based on evidence,” according to The Teagle Foundation. The foundation created and funded a program called Cornerstone, which originated at Purdue University, but has now spread to dozens of universities across the country. The initiative aims to revitalize the humanities, which Cornerstone believes are essential for the health of American civic life.

While scientific disciplines can often get millions in funding, $200,000 for the humanities is significant. Not only can Warnock and Kimball use the funding to develop this new curriculum, but they can provide financial compensation for the faculty who put in extra work on it, bring in outside speakers to offer teaching insight and establish program assessments to measure its success.

“The idea of a university, or the idea of an undergraduate degree, is that you are spending four or five years doing this so you can build a life that is meaningful and consequential,” Kimball said. “A lot of that has to do with your profession, and you certainly want to train for a profession if you can, but it also has to do with how you think about the things that really matter. It’s about professional preparation, but it’s also about living a good and happy life and being a person who can contribute as a citizen and not just as a worker.” 

The newly developed minor will consist of reading seminars centered on transformational texts that have significantly influenced individuals, communities and societies across time. Through close reading and discussion, students will engage with complex philosophical ideas, analyze challenging texts and build a sense of community through shared intellectual exploration.

The courses aren’t meant to test students’ knowledge of something specific. More so, the goal is for students to wrestle with these complex ideas and make sense of them within their own context. The intention of this course is to help students develop critical thinking skills with the ability to engage in complicated topics with people in their community.

"There is a real underestimation of students’ hunger for this kind of curriculum and these kinds of conversations,” Warnock explained. He continues to embrace Drexel’s motto, “Art, who are we? Industry, how do we sustain life? Science, how do we know and learn?"

The program will also be unique because Philadelphia, with its rich history and culture, will act as an important backdrop. According to Warnock, "What makes our program different from everywhere else is that we’re using Philadelphia as this kind of background or spine to it." 

The biggest goal for the future of this program is to get students excited about participating and for it to become a meaningful part of Drexel culture. There is evidence that schools that have programs similar to this have grown organically and stimulate a common intellectual culture, where students take what they’re reading in class and converse about it with friends or family members, therefore making the humanities an integral part of their everyday lives.