Matteo Ricci College

Web: http://www.seattleu.edu/matteo-ricci/

Paulette Kidder, PhD, Interim Dean
Michael Matriotti, ThD, Associate Dean
Fr. John F. Foster, S.J., MA, STM, Executive Assistant to the Dean and Chaplain to the College
Elizabeth Layton, MIT, Program Coordinator and Director of Advising and Career Planning
 

Objectives

The purpose of the College is to make every student as successful as possible by building a solid foundation in the Humanities. Such a foundation develops students who are alert to their own cultural presuppositions, capable of eloquent self-expression, and involved meaningfully in the world. These attributes create a graduate who grasps the connections among self-appropriation, Jesuit tradition, compelling persuasion, and ethical action. Ultimately, a foundation in the Humanities cultivates one’s humanity. The purpose of such an investigation is, above all else, to contribute to a life worth living through a deeper sense of one’s own person and significance.

Matteo Ricci College has always been an “experimental college,” a laboratory for curricular innovation, hence among its objectives is the continuing enterprise of creating new elective courses for the benefit of Seattle University as a whole. A related objective is to keep alive the student-centered pedagogy of the best of Jesuit education through small classes, an integral curriculum, and close attention to individual students.

Although many graduates have gone directly from Matteo Ricci College to promising career placements, humanistic education should be seen as pre-professional, not as terminal, education. Matteo Ricci College, consistent with the mission of Seattle University, seeks to develop first fully human persons who can then take the greatest possible advantage of their subsequent professional training and opportunities. In the specific case of students seeking the bachelor of arts in humanities for teaching, the objective of the college is to educate future teachers who will become inspirations to their own students, exemplars to their peers, and de facto missionaries of the wisdom in learning.  Students seeking the bachelor of arts in humanities for leadership will graduate with an articulate possession of knowledge in the humanities, an acknowledgement of their own skills and weaknesses at leading, an area of specialization that prepares them to make a contribution in the job market, an ever greater capacity for discernment as a way of life, and a deepening desire to serve others, especially the poor and marginalized.