Kensiderations

A common theme in these comments is that Thomas Aquinas College is deficient in natural science and lacks sufficient rigor in the STEM disciplines. What’s ironic is that our students study more math and science than most undergraduates anywhere, outside of math and science concentrations. Our students take eight semester-long courses in mathematics (28 credit hours) and eight semester-long courses in natural science (another 28 credit hours). The number of credit hours is equivalent to a minor in mathematics and a minor in natural science. Apart from STEM majors, that’s more than any other undergraduate program in the country. Students at the College don’t just read essays about math or natural science, they demonstrate proofs or theorems from Euclid, Galileo, and Newton. We don’t shy away from reading difficult books such as Newton’s “Principia” or Maxwell’s theory of electromagnetism. We not only read Darwin’s “Origin of Species” but later proponents and critics of evolutionary theory, such as Jacques Monod and Stephen Jay Gould; we read Einstein’s “General Theory of Relativity”; we read Mendeleev’s original scientific papers proposing the periodic table. One might object that we don’t use modern textbooks, study the latest scientific theories, or have sophisticated laboratories. That’s intentional. We want our students to understand the progress of the natural sciences in the context of the full range of academic disciplines, such as philosophy and theology. They examine the foundations of modern science and develop the habit of mind that seeks first principles. Our graduates pursue a wide variety of STEM professions: physics, engineering, medicine, and tech. They excel in these fields because our program fosters intellectual rigor, first-principles thinking, and the ability to tackle real world problems creatively.