COLLEGE OF ARTS & SCIENCES

Message From the Dean

I am glad to welcome you as a virtual visitor to the College of Arts and Sciences at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Our web site has recently been updated and redesigned for better organization and easier navigation. We will be continuing the redesign and adding new features over the coming months and I encourage you to return often.

The College is the largest of the eight academic units that make up the University, with almost 500 full-time faculty in 21 academic departments and seven interdepartmental programs, spanning the arts, humanities, social sciences, natural sciences, and mathematics. Each of these departments and programs has its own web page and I encourage you to visit those that interest you through the links at the left.

Despite the wide range of disciplines and academic programs represented in the College, all of our faculty share a deep commitment to advancing discovery and learning. The College faculty are accomplished researchers, scholars, and artists, many of them with national and international reputations in their specialties. At the same time, they are enthusiastic and dedicated teachers, involved in guiding the intellectual development of their students at all levels, from freshmen in their first semester of college to advanced graduate students working towards their Ph.D. Whatever the setting, our faculty’s teaching and mentoring is informed and enlivened by their personal involvement in discovering new knowledge, exploring new artistic forms, or applying the results of research in new contexts.

Many of the academic disciplines represented in the College are those historically called the “liberal arts.” This term, which originated in the Middle Ages, identified the kinds of knowledge and understanding necessary for a free (Latin, liber) person to live and participate in society. For well over a thousand years, the liberal arts have been the foundation of all higher education, whether they are studied for their own sake or as the basis for careers in business, medicine, law, or other professions. UNCG requires all students, no matter what their major, to complete a General Education Curriculum (GEC) that includes courses in the traditional liberal arts, as well as courses that introduce them to new perspectives that have become increasingly important today. The College offers most of the University’s general education courses, in addition to the hundreds of more specialized courses that make up its undergraduate majors and graduate programs.

By maintaining strong programs of research and scholarship, the College faculty work to advance our understanding of fundamental problems across a wide range of disciplines. And by offering challenging graduate and undergraduate degree programs, the faculty help guide the intellectual development of students who will use the knowledge and skills they learn here to enrich their own lives and contribute to society. The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is an exciting place and the College of Arts and Sciences provides numerous opportunities for learning and discovery. Join us in exploring them.

Timothy D. Johnston

Dean and Professor of Psychology