Our Vision
“It was a balm to my soul.”
— Louis, Collegium Undergraduate Fellow
The Collegium Institute is a vibrant intellectual community devoted to fostering the Catholic intellectual tradition, and the liberal tradition of humane studies more broadly, within the University of Pennsylvania community.
Founded by faculty, alumni, students, and friends of the University of Pennsylvania, the Collegium Institute draws mainstream learning into conversation with the Catholic intellectual tradition in the university community. It seeks to enrich academic culture by sharing the intellectual fruits of the Catholic tradition with a mainstream audience, both secular and religious, and by supporting scholarship, teaching, and learning that engages across the disciplines. In so doing, it also cultivates reflection on "catholic" or universal questions and on the unity of truth across the disciplines.
The institute’s name, collegium,
serves as a reminder that the pursuit of knowledge, which is the principal object of all universities, is a communal enterprise.
Its flourishing depends upon its members working together to cultivate certain virtues of mind and character, such as humility, trust, honesty, justice, and the love of truth. By witnessing to these enduring virtues, the Collegium Institute aims to serve contemporary academia and become a vibrant center of learning within it.
The need.
Academic inquiry is increasingly fragmented. Although scholarly output today is impressive, indeed staggering, the ongoing specialization of knowledge in all fields continues to widen the distance between them. Together with our colleges and universities, and with all due humility in the face of our own finitude and the deep mysteries that remain at the heart of existence, we reaffirm the collective human project to integrate knowledge. We seek to propose conversations that can both grapple with and transcend any epistemological skepticism that would stifle the pursuit of wisdom, and we commit to a humane education that can encompass pre-professional or vocational training but orient it toward the pursuit of the good life and the common good.
The Catholic intellectual tradition is a reservoir of profound thinking about the synthesis of knowledge. By bringing this tradition into conversation with the secular academy and by encouraging a holistic approach to scholarship that transcends disciplinary boundaries, the Collegium Institute affirms the unifying and truly liberal ends of education — namely, freedom in truth.
Check out this 10th anniversary video in which students, faculty, and staff discuss the mission and impact of the Collegium Institute.