The Core Courses are interrelated. Although they need not be taken in a rigid sequential order, they are organized to provide a progression in development. The Core Courses address the need to explore the self (The Search for Meaning), to encounter the other (The Conquest of Caliban: Exploration and Domination) and to integrate the self and the other in a global community (The United States in a Changing World: Issues in Globalization). External evaluators of the MALS program have extolled its interlocking and comprehensive structure.

Core courses are team-taught. Graduates of the Program cite this as one of its most exciting qualities.

Nowhere else in the nation does a graduate Liberal Studies program offer the opportunity of an integrated, team-taught series of Core Courses.