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Dr. Christopher Decaen (’93), a tutor on the California campus, has joined a select group of ���ϲ����� faculty: those who have taught all 23 courses in the College’s classical curriculum. 

“Chris had already completed the program once as a student, but completing it again as a tutor requires a level of mastery that is a remarkable achievement,” says Dr. John Goyette, the College’s vice president for advancement. Only six other members of the teaching faculty have achieved this milestone: Dr. Thomas Kaiser, Dr. Glen Coughlin, Dr. John Nieto, Mr. David Quackenbush, Dr. Andrew Seeley, and Dr. Sean Collins.

���ϲ����� is unique among American colleges and universities in requiring its faculty members to teach not only in their areas of expertise, but in all the disciplines — language, logic, mathematics, music, natural science, literature, economics, history, philosophy, and theology — that make up its fully integrated curriculum.

“In a way, the tutor needs to teach the whole program for the same reason that the student must complete it.”

“In a way, the tutor needs to teach the whole program for the same reason that the student must complete it,” Dr. Decaen remarks. “The ‘walls’ between the sciences are porous; indeed, their ceilings and roofs are hierarchical, some building on others, and all of them reflecting the same One Truth. Thus, there cannot help but be a unity to all truths, though one can miss it when not watching for it. And the curriculum at TAC has that unity as an explicit part of both what it teaches and how it teaches, especially in the order of the courses. Both the students and the tutors see this and benefit from it.”

After graduating from the College in 1993 and pursuing advanced degrees in philosophy at the Catholic University of America, Dr. Decaen joined the College’s teaching faculty in 1999. Given the relative youth of the College, the number of tutors who have taught the entire curriculum will surely grow in the years to come. For now, however, Dr. Decaen remains in rare company. “Chris’s achievement illustrates the commitment of our entire faculty to our integrated program of studies, which we pursue together with the students in a close-knit community of friends,” says Dr. Goyette.

“Seeing the integration of TAC’s program firsthand gives one a perspective on reality itself that is, paradoxically, at once illuminating and mystifying,” Dr. Decaen adds. “The former because you make genuine progress when you peer up toward the heights, the latter because you only make out the summit in a vague way. I imagine that any tutor who ‘finishes’ the program is ready to dive back in and start over. You’re never really finished — not this side of Paradise, anyway.”