Mission - Faculty of Arts
The Faculty of Arts stresses depth, breadth, and integration in all of our teaching and learning. Our programs, departments, and courses offer a wide variety of analytical, critical, and imaginative opportunities to think about, express, question, and re-imagine both the world and ourselves as part of our local, national and global communities. We provide students with a range of approaches to knowing and acting in the world, always focusing on a set of common questions about what it means to be ethical, to be creative, to live with understanding and respect in diverse contexts, and to act for the social good.
Our faculty members are award-winning teachers and scholars with a wide range of expertise and interest. We stress intellectual curiosity about the world around us and the importance of preparing students with the skills, resourcefulness, confidence, eagerness, and vision to respond to and succeed in facing the many challenges of the world. Our common focus on developing analytical and critical reasoning, creative thinking and problem solving, oral and written communication skills, and diverse knowledge enables students to achieve meaningful, productive, responsible, and rewarding lives, while providing them with relevant skills for a diverse range of careers.
In Arts, we:
- Encourage complex historical and multi-cultural understandings of the world
- Establish reservoirs of knowledge about our own and other societies
- Understand the importance of discovering and possessing many ways of knowing the world, and the value of the difference those ways make to how we act in the world
- Know and appreciate the variety of subject matter, questions and approaches, and practices and achievements of the creative and performing arts, the humanities, and the social sciences
- Stress the acquisition of scholarly and creative practices and skills
- Foster the technical expertise needed for conducting research in the humanities and social sciences
- Emphasize the development of research techniques and other scholarly and creative practices and skills
- Promote the relevance of cross-cultural knowledge and exchange
- Enhance the ability to work both individually and independently, and collaboratively and collegially
- Cultivate the capacity to think critically, analytically, and creatively
- Develop the ability to write and to speak coherently and effectively to different audiences, and to communicate in a wide variety of formats
- Advance the skills for intellectually engaged and responsible citizenship, and for living a full, satisfying, and productive life
