"On a huge hill, cragged, and steep, truth stands and he that will reach her, about must and about must go.... "
-John Donne

The Origins of Liberal Studies
The decision to inaugurate the Liberal Studies degree came from changes in higher education. Before the Civil War, college education was general education, liberal arts, ancient classics, rhetoric, some mathematics and philosophy, covering a number of present-day subjects. After the Civil War, using the German universities as models and seeking to become research institutions, graduate education became increasingly specialized, professionalized, organized into distinct and specified academic departments/disciplines and increasingly interested in science and technology. That trend continued and accelerated in the 20th century.

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The Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Programs
One hundred and twenty colleges and universities, large and small, public and private, have followed Wesleyan’s leadership, adopting the philosophy of Graduate Liberal Studies, and they offer graduate degrees primarily known as Masters of Arts in Liberal Studies (MALS), Master of Liberal Studies (MLS), and Master of Liberal Arts (MLA). Other degree designations are possible, such as Master of Humanities, as long as the program carrying the name clearly exemplifies the philosophy of Graduate Liberal Studies. There is an organization that embodies and fosters that philosophy. It is the Association of Graduate Liberal Studies Program (AGLSP). [To view the AGLSP website, go to http://aglsp.org/]. Due to its origins, Liberal Studies began and has remained primarily a graduate program with a distinctive philosophy of education: graduate, interdisciplinary, liberal arts, organized for working adults. While 3/4 of our students are at the graduate level, here at Georgetown there is also a Bachelor’s degree (known as the Bachelor of Arts in Liberal Studies—BALS) which shares the interdisciplinary, values-focused philosophy of education of Liberal Studies. Georgetown University inaugurated a Doctor of Liberal Studies Degree in 2005. Liberal Studies Programs are administered through Graduate Schools, Schools of Arts and Sciences, and Schools of Continuing Education.

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The Origins of Georgetown's Liberal Studies Program
A small group of faculty and administrators led by representatives from Wesleyan, Dartmouth, and Hollins College in Virginia began meetings in 1973 to discuss the common interests in this exciting new kind of degree. Among the attendees was Joseph Pettit, D.B.A., then Georgetown’s Dean of the School for Summer and Continuing Education. Dr. Pettit, encouraged by the contacts he had made with other interested university representatives, pursued creating a Liberal Studies degree program for Georgetown University where liberal arts and human values have, in the Jesuit tradition, always been a cardinal part of the University mission and curriculum. His efforts were successful when he won approval for this new degree and courses began in the summer of 1974. By spring 1975, an association emerged from the members who had attended the early meetings. Georgetown was a charter member of the AGLSP.

Values Orientation
Focusing on specific themes, issues, questions, and difficulties, Liberal Studies courses allow and encourage students to confront perennial and current problems and recurring questions that we pose about our own identities, our past and future, our unique national experiences and conflicts, international behavior, and our place in a threatened environment. Thus a strong values orientation is crucial to the curriculum design of the degree. According to Gerhard Casper, former president of Stanford, “What we really need in universities . . . is a very vigorous and particularly a very rigorous discussion about the human condition, its elements, its values.” Dr. Ronald Johnson, Georgetown Professor of History and Liberal Studies, states, “In the midst of a society that is preoccupied with the achievement of professional status and individual success, we are committed to the study of the social ideals and values that unite us as humans and attempt to address the needs of a hurried, often fragmented world. We absorb new ideas and, almost without noticing it, develop new insights about our common life and mutual understandings.”

The main Jesuit tradition at Georgetown really has as its aim the liberal studies. The Jesuit approach involves educating the whole person, through a multidisciplinary approach based in the liberal arts. It expects to produce educated people who contribute to society is some way.

Interdisciplinary Approach
As the course titles and descriptions indicate, all the Liberal Studies degree courses make a deliberate effort to synthesize rather than merely analyze, to shift students’ attention away from specialized fields of endeavor toward broader, more comprehensive areas of human intellectual interest. “Implicit in the concept of a genuine liberal education is the necessity for integration. The liberal arts are precisely those subjects, those disciplines, those ways of thinking and knowing which do not focus on the self, the other, the thing in isolation but on all of them together—their similarities and their differences, all their varied relationships to one another: The liberal arts encourage the mind to move from the present to the past and the future, from the immediate to the timeless, from the individual to the universal and back again” (Georgetown University Main Campus, Goals and Objectives Statement, 1981).