ACADEMIC CATALOG

Any university worthy of the name is committed to searching for truth and, as far as possible, to finding it. Moreover, it is obliged to pass on the great deposit of truth discovered and confirmed by succeeding generations. But a university must not limit itself to one region of truth to the exclusion of others; it is open to all truth. St. John Henry Newman has explained in a masterful way how the professors and students of a university grow into this unity of truth. They do not just accumulate truths, learning one after another, but they see these truths in relation to each other so that they illuminate each other and reality. Professors lead their students in developing a sense of the unity of knowledge, so that they never forget the whole when they study the parts. In this way, as Newman writes, they do not just enlarge their learning, but they begin to grow in the wisdom that “discerns the whole in each part, the end in each beginning . . . because it [wisdom] always knows where it is, and how its path lies from one point to another.”