Excellence in Action:Your Foundation for the Future

   

   The College of Liberal Arts was created in 1929 after school superintendents, who were impressed with the teachers from Kent State, insisted that such a quality undergraduate education be available to their students who were interested in pursuing other careers. This resulted in a grassroots movement of service clubs, chambers of commerce, American Legion posts, and many civic organizations to bring a liberal arts college to northeast Ohio. The College was established with two objectives: to provide the opportunity for contact with a variety of fields of human knowledge necessary for general culture and to provide the opportunity for special study in the field of the student’s individual interest.

Karl Leebrick, President of Kent State University from 1938-43, advocated that the College of Liberal Arts become, in his words, “the backbone of the university.” He reorganized the university into 3 colleges, liberal arts, education, and business, but insisted that the College of Liberal Arts hold the central position of the university.

In 1956 the College of Liberal Arts was renamed the College of Arts and Sciences and grouped into the Humanities, the Social Sciences, and the Natural Sciences and Mathematics. Currently, the College of Arts and Sciences houses 19 departments. It offers 32 Bachelor of Arts majors, 18 Bachelor of Science majors and 54 minors. At the graduate level, we offer Masters degrees in 40 programs and Doctorates in 13 disciplines. The College has long appreciated and taken advantage of the interrelationships among the Humanities, Social Sciences, and Natural Sciences. There are currently 10 interdisciplinary undergraduate majors and 24 interdisciplinary minors. No matter what major a student chooses, the first year of each student’s academic career is spent mostly in courses from the College of Arts and Sciences learning basic writing, quantitative, and critical thinking skills. The College also provides the vast majority of diversity courses, many times giving students their first exposure to cultures other than their own.

The tradition of the liberal arts and sciences at Kent State extends beyond the undergraduate program to the graduate program. The Master’s program in Liberal Studies, housed in Arts & Sciences, encourages students to continue, or return to, studies that integrate several disciplines. They find their own unifying theme for their individual programs, follow their intellectual curiosity beyond the boundaries of specialization, and recharge their imaginations with the energy of a great tradition.
That tradition, with roots in ancient Greece, manifests itself in all of these areas in two complementary ways. Its conservative force comes from its function of transmitting culture from generation to generation. Its radical force comes from its function of questioning everything, including that cultural heritage. The result is a powerful blend of tradition and innovation, stability and progress—not a bad result for our students as they sort out their own values and make decisions as social and political beings in society.

As the state increasingly emphasizes the information and technology areas, we must continually remember that information and technology must be put into context—a human context. Whatever data are produced in today’s world must be processed and the implications to human values, human history, human lore, and human society must be articulated and critically analyzed. Information devoid of wisdom is ineffective and unproductive.

The heart of our college is the dedicated faculty who conduct original research, and who teach students in the classroom, in the laboratory, and in the community the skills, values, and wisdom of a liberal arts education. This education is the greatest gift the university can provide for the public good. Citizens who can think critically are the necessary ingredient for a healthy democracy.

As we continue the next 75 years of delivering a liberal arts education, the College remains dedicated to the pursuit of human excellence. We continue to devote our lives to educating a person rather than training a worker. The Woodrow Wilson Foundation states that short-sighted careerism is impractical as well as intellectually narrow and predicts that as jobs quickly become outmoded in the 21st century, careers will depend on the capacity for quantitative, literary, historical, and scientific thinking—the very foundations of a liberal arts education. As a College, we take our role as the backbone of this university very seriously. The College of Arts and Sciences may be old-fashioned in continuing to hold fast to traditional values, but the liberal education it provides is as important to the students in the professional programs as it is to the students in our own college. We thank you for your interest in the College of Arts and Sciences.