Strategic Planning Statement
Position
The College of Liberal Arts comprises sixteen departments offering highly selective programs in the arts, humanities, communications, and social sciences. These diverse disciplines share a focus on human experience and expression. Providing nearly a third of the university’s instruction, the CLA serves as an essential component of liberal education for all students at Cal Poly. The CLA fosters excellence within its cutting-edge disciplinary and interdisciplinary courses of study while diversifying, extending, and enriching the broader polytechnic environment. Its rich history of teaching excellence, active research and creative endeavors, and the breadth and depth of its course offerings position the CLA as central to the Cal Poly educational experience.
Mission
The College of Liberal Arts promotes excellence through teaching, scholarship and service in the arts, humanities, communications, and social sciences. The CLA encourages intellectual discovery and individual growth by promoting diversity, social responsibility and life-long learning-by-doing in both the local and the global communities. CLA occupies a pivotal position in the comprehensive university, providing Cal Poly students with a broad and substantive understanding of the individual, developing their capacity for critical inquiry and discourse, fostering intellectual curiosity and the pursuit of knowledge, promoting creative thought and aesthetic appreciation, and integrating technology into a broader, human context.
Values
The College of Liberal Arts upholds open and critical disciplinary and interdisciplinary inquiry, effective communication, creative thinking, aesthetic endeavor, and their application to contemporary issues. We advocate cultural and intellectual diversity, sustainability, professional ethics, self-awareness, and responsible citizenship. We espouse the integration of humane and aesthetic values with technological proficiency in support of the University’s mission. As essential and engaged members of our comprehensive polytechnic university, we embrace the university’s commitment to the learn-by-doing philosophy through our research, theory, and practice.
Vision
The College of Liberal Arts will be indispensable to Cal Poly’s achieving national recognition as a premier comprehensive polytechnic university. Its emphasis on creative thinking, human understanding, and innovative action will empower our graduates to confront challenges responsibly by understanding the historical, ethical, aesthetic, technological and philosophical complexities of global and local communities. Through its programs, research, and scholarship, the CLA will exemplify the values required to create a robust, vibrant, diverse, and responsible culture that sustains progress, beauty, and justice for the larger society.
Learning Objectives
College of Liberal Arts graduates will be able to:
- Question assumptions through critical inquiry.
- Be innovative; think creatively and constructively.
- Communicate effectively orally and in writing.
- Develop scholarly depth within their disciplines.
- Understand the value of cross-disciplinary knowledge.
- Collaborate productively in diverse settings and with diverse others.
- Make reasoned, ethical, and socially and ecologically responsible decisions.
- Understand the self as product of—and participant in—global traditions of art, ideas, and values.
- Engage in life-long learning.
Approved by the CLA Department Chairs January 22, 2008