About Liberal Arts and Sciences

Liberal Arts and Sciences provides art and design students with a diverse and intellectually stimulating environment cultivating the critical tools that enable them to become informed artists and designers who are prepared to meet global challenges. The curriculum is constructed around four themes: Connecting to creativity, arguing for humanity, math and science in action, and resourcing the future.

Student Learning Outcomes

Students in the Liberal Arts and Sciences Department will:

• Communicate ideas in a coherent, logical, and compelling way for different purposes and audiences.
• Identify issues clearly, synthesize and contextualize relevant sources, and make connections across experiences and disciplinary perspectives to create well-reasoned and imaginative approaches to issues, problems, and challenges.
• Develop skills to locate, evaluate, and use information resources from both traditional and emerging technologies appropriately effectively, and ethically.
• Develop collaborative skills to construct knowledge, negotiate effective outcomes, and generate new insights.
• Forge interdisciplinary connections among the liberal arts and sciences, studio, and community.
• Develop cultural awareness in a global context.

Program Themes

Creativity

Creativity is an ability to produce work that is generative, novel, innovative, original and unexpected.  Hallmarks of the creative process include generating expansive and imaginative alternatives, viewing the familiar in extraordinary ways, investigating mistakes as potential pathways to success, as well as persevering in curiosity and critical inquiry beyond assumed limitations.

Diversity

Diversity is a value and practice of actively recognizing the plurality of positions, methodologies, and practices around people, groups, objects, and ideas. It also refers to acceptance and respect for individuals and groups regardless of and sometimes because of their differences. In a global world that is complex and multidimensional, diversity often involves a convergence of multiple identities, moving beyond tolerance to an appreciation of diversity as a rich resource with significant benefits.

Identity

Identity generally refers to those qualities or characteristics that define us and distinguish us from others. It can have many values, personal or collective, innate or constructed, permanent or changing, often because of situational perspectives.

Social Responsibility

Social Responsibility is an ethical commitment to sensitivity and empathy for the consequences of our actions. The practice of social responsibility assumes the connections between individuals and communities, and a concern for humanity.  Social responsibility recognizes the importance of activism in engaging members of a community and/ or institutions to make a difference.

Faculty Office Hours

Full-time faculty office hours are posted outside the Liberal Arts and Sciences office. All faculty can be contacted by email for an appointment.