Office of the Dean

May 2025

Dear Colleagues,

With the end of the semester and the end of my time at Purdue University upon us, I want to offer my sincere thanks to you and celebrate some of our shared achievements of the past decade.

Ten years ago this month, in a message to the College, I called for a new chapter for the Purdue University College of Liberal Arts, one in which we would no longer apologize for what we do or see ourselves as a lesser part of the University. It is among my greatest points of pride that today, the College of Liberal Arts is a leader in our industry and a voice for the importance of our role in educating the next generation of citizens prepared to engage in self-governance as productive members of society.

I am proud as well that we have advanced many of the initiatives outlined in 2015.

Through Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts, Degree in 3, and Degree Plus, we have strengthened the undergraduate experience and engaged more Purdue students with our College.

Our graduate education program has been upgraded with more generous stipends, highly competitive assistantships, more time for research, and investment in graduate student research and travel.

With 218 faculty joining our ranks since 2015, we have welcomed a robust group of scholars to our academic community. As we have invested in faculty excellence, we have seen recognition of our academic programs grow as evidenced by meaningful jumps for history, political science, and sociology in the most recent U.S. News graduate program rankings, as well as a meaningful top 20 Leiter Report ranking for philosophy.

We have achieved a positive budget situation and entered into agreements and online degree programs that bring new money into the College. Our innovative and entrepreneurial mindset has resulted in new bachelor of arts degrees in artificial intelligence, music, and our newest, the history of science, medicine, and technology, to name a few.

Alongside these achievements, the new front door of the College of Liberal Arts, the fully renovated University Hall, will open this fall. While I will not spend my workdays in its new Dean’s office, I am pleased that we were able to move this project forward to polish the crown jewel of the Purdue campus. It will be an important symbol for the College in the coming decades.

We set a goal in 2015 for the College to emerge as a leader in innovative liberal arts education and scholarship. Today, we have become the leader we aspired to be. I invite you to review measures of that impact here. I am mindful that this is the result of efforts by faculty and staff across the College. For all of those efforts, I am very grateful.

As I leave you and leave Purdue, it is with the final stanza of the Athenian Oath in mind. “… we will transmit this city, not only not less, but greater, better and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us.”

With that, I bid you farewell with my very best wishes.

Sincerely,

David A. Reingold

Senior Vice President for Policy Planning

Justin S. Morrill Dean of Liberal Arts