Kirkpatrick Signature Series

(9 semester hours)

The Kirkpatrick Signature Series is the intellectual linchpin of the General Education component of Bellevue University's institutional mission. The series focuses on the institutions and traditions of Western Civilization that have achieved unprecedented success in the United States, and it finds ground for intellectual, social and cultural progress in the productive tensions between tradition and change, and freedom and responsibility. It highlights the importance of active citizenship in a rapidly changing world, one in which popular government, the Western tradition, and American values are sometimes severely tested. The series emphasizes intense your involvement in active intellectual and experiential learning-affirming the values of limited government, popular rule, entrepreneurial processes, and reflective inquiry.

The Kirkpatrick Signature Series fits an information-age philosophy and reflects a dynamic approach to the complex realities of life in the 21st Century.

Founded in 2008 as an extension of the Signature Series, the University's Center for American Vision and Values is an educational and research institute, dedicated to the exploration and promulgation of ideas and beliefs that have contributed to American exceptionalism.

Through the Kirkpatrick Signature Series, lectures, debates, research, a Visiting Scholars Program, a student Junior Fellows Program, and other educational outreach initiatives, the Center for American Vision and Values examines, with academic, community, and corporate participants, the principles of free enterprise, limited government, individual freedom, and traditional American values and beliefs—values inherent in successful entrepreneurial and corporate cultures, as well as in the Midwestern ethic that has guided Bellevue University toward its success.

(Click a course name below to view course details)

• LA 400 American Vision and Values

  Focuses on the political and philosophical traditions of the western world, especially as they are found in the American vision and embedded in the values, traditions, documents, and institutions of the United States.

• LA 410 Tradition and Change

  Begins with world traditions and investigates how social, economic, intellectual, and moral forces of change act against them. The course focuses on the tensions between tradition and change in the production of intellectual, social, and cultural progress. The course emphasizes intense student involvement in a comprehensive learning experience, culminating in a formal written thesis that confronts the values of limited government, popular rule, entrepreneurial processes, and reflective inquiry.

• LA 420 Freedom and Responsibility

  Focuses on the institutions and traditions of Western civilization that are found at the core of American democracy. Central focus is on the balanced relationship between freedom and the responsibilities involved in the ongoing maintenance of freedom in a just and productive society.

There are no substitution, ELA, or transfer courses for the Kirkpatrick Signature Series.