A foundation for exploration

All first-year Lewis & Clark students receive a common foundation through a yearlong course called Exploration and Discovery. Over its two intensive semesters, students experience the vital affinity between shared intellectual exploration and individual pathways of discovery, while also sharpening their skills in writing, reading, reasoning, and speaking. In the fall course, faculty and students forge a common academic culture by exploring together a core of "great works" and their enduring questions. This year those works include Plato's dialogues, Virgil's Aeneid, Descartes' Meditations, and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The spring semester seminars, in turn, consider how such questions inform today's diverse world and how specific disciplines approach and answer them. Topics range from "The Art of War" to "Darwin, Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow" and "Black Music and Racial Encounter."

The yearlong course acquaints Lewis & Clark students both with the liberal arts tradition’s most enduring ideas and questions and with modern disciplinary methods of analysis and discovery. The collaborative invention of faculty members from a wide range of academic disciplines, Exploration and Discovery guides first-year students from the intellectual foundations to the far frontiers of the liberal arts. By so doing, the course echoes the College’s motto, Explorare, Discere, Sociare (to explore, to learn, to work together).