Sewanee educates men and women for an ever-changing world by developing their general intellectual capacities, especially the capacity to continue learning. Immersed in a myriad of glorious details - sonnets and sonatas, experiments and graphical representations, primary sources and historical narratives, grammatical declensions and ephemeral forest ponds - students explore who they are and who they wish to become while expanding their abilities to question, reason, understand, and explain. The details of their studies demand great patience, and the details do matter, but primarily as the vehicles of the learner's journey.
Led by faculty who already know the path well and who want to share the joy of discovery, students begin to read carefully and with new insight, to analyze arguments and evaluate theories, and to write and speak with clarity, precision, and style. While the Mountain's ancient splendor quietly informs all academic pursuits at Sewanee, scientific studies of the environment and the natural world gain special pertinence in this setting.
Students at Sewanee also look far beyond the Mountain. They study a foreign or classical language, entering another cultural world in the process; they explore the human past and the politics and economies of contemporary human societies; they scrutinize the aesthetic and cultural legacies of human civilizations including literary and religious texts and traditions. Some act, sing, paint, write poetry, or play musical instruments; some conduct laboratory experiments or collect data from systematic observations.
Not merely by their absorbing facts and figures, then, but primarily through the guided discipline of their own research, writing, creating, and performing, Sewanee students participate actively in the production of art and knowledge and so doing, gain abilities and attributes that will serve them well regardless of where their journeys take them. At Sewanee, we believe that rigorous study in the liberal arts offers students the best preparation for a life of leadership, service, and learning.
