General Education Requirements

Life doesn’t always fit neatly into major fields. A liberal arts education is one that prepares you for life by exposing you to a broad range of academic disciplines and ideas, and by sharpening fundamental communication and critical thinking skills in the process. The University of Richmond’s general education curriculum is distinctive because it gives students a great deal of personal choice while at the same time bringing all first-year students together to complete a shared academic experience—the Core Course.

The University’s general education curriculum is made up of four main components:

• The first-year Core Course, a two-semester writing- and reading-intensive class that includes texts by Plato, Nietzsche, Marx, Darwin, and Gandhi. Core lays the foundation for a life of inquiry and guarantees that all first-year students will have plenty to discuss in their downtime.
• Communication skills, which comprises expository writing and proficiency in a foreign language. A liberal arts education turns out great thinkers who can write compelling arguments that turn rhetoric into reality, and that is the goal of the expository writing course, taken during your first year. The University is also deeply committed to providing an international education to all students, regardless of where and when they decide to venture out into the world, so proficiency in a language other than English (typically four semesters of study) is required.
• Field of study requirements in six areas: historical studies, literary studies, social analysis, visual and performing arts, symbolic reasoning, and natural science. This is where students branch out and explore the ways that different academic disciplines seek knowledge and understand the world.
• Wellness, which comprises a short alcohol awareness program called URAware and two elective mini-workshops on health- and wellness-related topics such as nutrition, sexual health, and fitness.

For a full description of all requirements and detailed information about satisfying them, please see the Undergraduate Catalog.