Welcome to the Blackburn College website. I invite you to browse through our academic programs and learn more about who we are and what we do.

At Blackburn College, our sole purpose is to provide the best possible educational and developmental experiences for our students. Our academic programs are solidly grounded in the outstanding educational background and experience of our faculty. When this foundation is coupled with excellent opportunities for learning and growth in the Work Program and Co-Curricular program, great things happen for students learn the skills that research has consistently shown are essential to success beyond college.

Blackburn is not for everybody – it’s a place where you’ll be challenged in your classes, where professors know you by your first name, where you’ll be called on to participate in athletics, music, journalism, student government, or other important organizations, and where you’ll get your hands dirty because everyone is an essential partner in making this place work. Blackburn is one of only six Work Colleges in the nation. But our mission goes well beyond providing jobs, preparing people for jobs, or distributing information. Thirty years ago, in comments about the benefit of student work as part of the undergraduate experience, educator Lloyd Averill asserted that the job of colleges and universities was to “… assist students in clarifying who they are, what and whom they care about, what they have a talent to do, what kind of a world it is into which they have been thrust, and where and how that being and caring and doing can change the world in the direction of their own highest aspiration for it.” He didn’t know it at the time, but he was summarizing the approach Blackburn College has taken since the Work Program was instituted in 1913.

Blackburn is a place of opportunity – opportunities to participate fully in a community that calls upon all of our abilities and aims to raise them in preparation for a full and successful life. Blackburn is also a place of possibility – the development of talent through challenging and helping each person grow to his or her highest and best as a human being. We are a community dedicated to learning and growing as whole human beings. We are all on that pilgrim’s road to greater self-knowledge, wisdom, and growth. As the early Christian missionary Paul wrote in his letter to the Philippians: “whatever is true, whatever is noble, whatever is right, whatever is pure, whatever is lovely, whatever is admirable – if anything is excellent or praiseworthy – think about such things.” This is the essence of the liberal arts and our work together – the lifelong reaching for the great and the good – in our learning, our thinking, our convictions, and our actions.

We want to put the tools of skill and knowledge and wisdom into peoples’ hands to bring an honestly better world more fully into being. If that’s the kind of path you want to take in your life, take a look around our website. If you’re interested in what you see, give us a call or send us an email. We’ll be glad to hear from you.

Best wishes,

Jeff Aper
Provost