Our Vision
“It was a balm to my soul.”
— Louis, Collegium Undergraduate Fellow
Founded in 2013 by faculty, alumni, students, & friends of the University of Pennsylvania, the Collegium Institute is an independent, academic community with a catholic vision: that is, it draws the contemporary learning of America’s first secular university into conversation with the Catholic intellectual tradition and cultivates reflection on the catholic, or universal, questions that animate every human life.
Collegium Institute hosts scholarly projects and publications as well as programs and events in University City for students (graduate, undergraduate, and high school), faculty, and other learners of all faiths and of none.
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.