Undergraduate Catalogue
Liberal Studies Major
Bentley has always been committed to producing liberally educated business students; and Bentley arts and sciences departments have long developed their curricula to offer perspectives particularly geared to business students while maintaining the content and rigor of individual disciplines. However, all too often in higher education today, students feel they are forced to choose between a professional education that prepares them for their careers and a liberal arts education that prepares them for life. This is no longer the case for incoming Bentley students. The Liberal Studies major is an option for students already committed to a business education. This Liberal Studies major (LSM) is significantly different from the traditional liberal arts major — like philosophy or history or political science — that drills deep within a particular field of study. Rather, it explores important themes that may cut across many disciplines of the arts and sciences and business, such as ethics and social responsibility, global perspectives, media arts and society, and issues related to the environment; the major offers breadth with coherence.
The LSM is an optional double major. It does not stand alone, but is an interdisciplinary second major for students whose primary major is in a business or business-related discipline. The LSM is designed to help students increase the value and meaning of their liberal arts education at Bentley by combining some required courses in the general education curriculum with arts and sciences electives and some business electives under specific themes or concentrations.
Program Goals and Objectives:
- Students pursuing an LSM will be able to make connections relevant to a particular concentration’s theme across courses and disciplines
- Students will be able to analytically reflect on and meaningfully discuss choices and insights within the LSM
- Students will be able to write coherently about their choices and insights within the LSM and/or between the LSM and their primary majors or their co-curricular activities
Successful LSM graduates will:
- Choose a coherent course of study within a particular LSM theme, making a case for those choices each semester
- Demonstrate — through an iterative process over time — their reflections, insights, and connections across disciplines through discussion with their advisers and periodic narrative reflections that map where they have been and where they intend to go in order to expand their current understanding
- Produce a culminating project that demonstrates their transdisciplinary insights, connections and understanding as a consequence of their work within the theme
Students opting to complete an LSM will do so in one particular theme. Current Choices include:
- American Perspectives
- Earth, Environment, and Global Sustainability
- Ethics and Social Responsibility
- Global Perspectives
- Health and Industry
- Media Arts and Society
- Quantitative Perspectives
