Cornerstone

Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts provides students from across our West Lafayette and Indianapolis campuses with the opportunity to broaden their understanding of the world and themselves, while strengthening the skills to read closely, write clearly, speak with confidence, and to engage with differing viewpoints and perspectives. The program’s gateway sequence, SCLA 101 and 102, are anchored in transformative texts — the greatest that has been thought, said, and written across human history.  Here students explore and discuss big questions in small classes.  They engage with a full-time faculty member who cares about their intellectual growth and provides them with a social and cultural space that is welcoming, encouraging, and respectful of diverse backgrounds and opinions. 

Cornerstone honors free expression and seeks to cultivate an atmosphere where democratic rights and responsibilities are understood, practiced, and valued among the students.  Our faculty seek to show young adults how to form opinions based on reliable sources and how to express themselves in meaningful ways.  We also cultivate their creative side through our journal of student writing and artwork, The Cornerstone Review.

Cornerstone also is a 15 credit-hour undergraduate certificate program, which functions as a core within a core, providing students with a road map to navigate the varied options of Purdue’s core curriculum. The certificate’s classes and themes broaden our students understanding of their degree program and foster the creative thinking and communication skills needed by good business and industry leaders, and more importantly, good citizens capable of self-governance.

Cornerstone is nationally recognized as a model on how to revive interest and relevance for the liberal arts in higher education.  In September 2020, the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the Teagle Foundation announced a partnership to revitalize the role of the humanities in general education at college campuses across the country based on Purdue University’s Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts program. The NEH/Teagle Foundation program, Cornerstone: Learning for Living, over 70 colleges and universities are currently replicating the Purdue’s Cornerstone program.