Core Colloquia
Confronting Global Challenges
Exploring timeless questions about human experience and the world around us should be relished for its own sake. The Core Colloquia, organized around some of the most pressing challenges global society faces today, offer such opportunities even as they remind us that timeless questions can also be timely. As daily news reports bear out, the pursuit of equality, justice, peace, health, and sustainability are all vital endeavors to which individuals and nations must renew commitment and devote cooperative efforts.
Taught by faculty from all divisions, Core Colloquia aim to offer multidisciplinary, global perspectives and substantively engage two or more of the Core Competencies. These seminars help nurture civic awareness fundamental to global citizenship and leadership by developing your abilities to grapple with the complex conceptual and ethical dimensions of global issues, to communicate respectfully across cultural difference, and to devise problem-solving strategies. They remind us that your individual academic experiences contribute to our collective efforts to make NYUAD a new model of higher education for a global world.
The cooperation needed to address the world’s most pressing challenges depends upon a rich understanding of humanity itself, a sense of how societies and individuals have developed in relation to one another and to other species, to the environment, to technologies, and to ideas — both sacred and secular — about the universe. When it comes to tackling such challenges, Core Colloquia may raise questions to which there are no easy answers. But learning to pose good questions is itself an important skill, as is learning to approach them from multiple points of reference. Rather than simply taking the idea of a “global perspective” as a given, these courses require us to ask what it means to think about such enduring and urgent challenges across cultures, borders, disciplines, languages, and time.
Requirements
Students must complete 2 Core Colloquia within Core Curriculum.