Academic Principles

These principles govern all courses and other educational experiences at the college:

• Innovative, student-centered learning
  Guilford embraces effective and adventurous pedagogy. Learning formats are chosen to promote dynamic exchange among students and between students and faculty.

  Throughout, Guilford places the individual student at the core of its educational mission. In an environment committed to the value of interdependence, each student is encouraged to develop an individual viewpoint through the sharing of ideas with other members of the college's intentionally diverse community.

• Challenge to engage in creative and critical thinking
  Guilford emphasizes these activities: identifying and solving problems; delving below the surface of things to understand phenomena in their complexity; considering how frameworks and perspectives affect observations and analyses; appreciating the interplay of believing and doubting; and combining intuition, imagination, and the aesthetic sense with reasoning, quantitative analyses, and factual knowledge.

  Students learn not only to develop and synthesize ideas but also to articulate them clearly via the spoken and written word and other forms of creative expression. In particular, Guilford emphasizes writing as a mode of both learning and communicating, and thus students write intensively throughout their years here. Guilford especially values courses which point the way toward connections among ways of knowing: hence the college's interdisciplinary emphasis.

• Cultural and global perspectives
  Guilford strives to prepare students to be citizens of the world. Thus the curriculum is designed to encourage students and faculty to respect and learn from people of other cultures and also to foster an understanding of ecological relationships within the natural environment. By interacting with people from different cultural backgrounds and gaining sensitivity to their ways of life, students deepen their academic investigation of Western and other traditions. In the process, students are challenged to envision better societies and to work collectively with others toward mutual benefit.

• Values and ethical dimension of knowledge
  The Quaker ethos deeply influences the academic program as it does all other aspects of college life. In particular, the curriculum nurtures the spiritual dimension of wonder, the pursuit of meaning in life, and sensitivity to the sacred. It also promotes consciousness of those values necessary to successful inquiry: honesty, simplicity, equality, and tolerance.

  The college's courses are expected to explore the ethical dimension of knowledge. This often requires close attention to such issues as gender, race, ethnicity, religion, social justice, and socioeconomic in historical and contemporary contests.

• Focus on practical application: vocation and service to the larger community
  Noting Quaker founder George Fox's call for schools to teach "things civil and useful," Guilford's teachers seek to help their students choose majors and sequences of supporting courses which fit their interests and aptitudes and which lead to work and service possibilities that will bring personal fulfillment and challenge. The college also upholds each individual's obligation to the larger community: thus its commitment to personal responsibility, social justice, world peace, service, and ethical behavior. Rooted in the Society of Friends' social testimonies, the college aims to help its graduates learn to evaluate the effects of their actions and the implications of their decisions.