St. Ignatius Institute

The Saint Ignatius Institute (SII) is an undergraduate program at the University of San Francisco (USF), a private university operated by the California Province of the Society of Jesus (Jesuit Order) in San Francisco, California.

The SII offers a four-year, Great Books program as an alternative method for students to fulfill USF's undergraduate core curriculum requirements. From its inception in 1976, the SII has granted its Certificate of Liberal Arts to approximately 1,000 students.

During its first quarter century, the SII generated both controversy and accolades due to its traditional, classical approach to education and its orthodox theological stance within a larger, more liberal Jesuit institution.

In 1976 a group of educators founded what their leader, the Rev. Joseph Fessio, S.J., called, "a completely integrated liberal arts program in the Jesuit tradition." Fessio founded the SII in reaction to curriculum changes at the university which he saw as a departure from the traditional Jesuit approach to education.

The four-year-long sequence of studies in the liberal arts was designed to follow a method of seminars and lectures based on the students' reading of the Great Books of the Western World, in a roughly historical order. The reading list mostly resembled those at other undergraduate colleges offering Great Books programs such as St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and at Thomas Aquinas College, in Santa Paula, California.

...
Wikipedia