The Path Forward In-Depth
The College of Liberal Arts is a living ecosystem of inquiry, integration, and impact. Our vision for the future guides students, faculty, and alumni to navigate complexity, create knowledge, and contribute to the world around them. There are six areas of focus:
Research Support
Everything we do begins with what we know and the relentless pursuit of knowing more. This cycle of discovery is the engine of our teaching. The great success of a research university is its ability to bring students up to speed on the state of knowledge while empowering them to contribute to it. Precisely because Purdue is a leader in student accessibility, the College of Liberal Arts must now become a leader supporting the faculty research which students come here to learn and to pursue.
The Three-Legged Stool: Humanities, Social Sciences, Design, Art, and Performance
CLA is distinctive in the Big 10 for combining the humanities, the social sciences, and design, art and performance. This institutional legacy gives us a unique opportunity to intervene in our current historical moment, one in which our sense of the breadth of human experience and even our very ability to concentrate are being lost. By integrating these disciplines, we empower students to reclaim a richer sense of the institutional, artistic, and historical depth of the world around them. Our success lies in demonstrating models of collaboration; the more we work across the college to teach these unique ways of seeing and focusing, the more we offer a vital alternative to the fragmentation of modern life.
Purdue University in Indianapolis
Purdue’s new location in Indianapolis offers a unique opportunity to bring our strengths to work in the state capital, a hub for the cultural and civic institutions that connect our scholarly work with the broader public. The potential for engagement is immense. This expansion empowers our students with professional and collaborative experiences that were previously out of reach, bridging the gap between the classroom and the heart of Indiana’s cultural and political life.
Alumni Engagement
CLA is more than the staff, students, and faculty who work and study here at any given time. We are a global community of over 50,000 alumni, a significant percentage of whom remain right here in Indiana, contributing daily to our culture, economy, and civil society. We need to do more to understand and celebrate these contributions. Furthermore, our alumni possess a unique perspective on the transition from our classrooms to the professional world; by engaging them, we empower our current students to better navigate their own paths. Their insights help us advise students on how to make the most of their time at Purdue to ensure they are prepared for the meaningful work that follows.
Artificial Intelligence
The Liberal Arts study the intelligence of which we are currently trying to produce the artificial version. We also study human relationships and institutions which are increasingly mediated by AI and other forms of technology. And we have one of the strongest liberal arts research groups in the country studying AI itself. We are currently putting our leadership position to use by jointly developing an AI literacy course with the College of Science. This course will integrate technical and liberal arts instruction to provide a foundation for students’ use and understanding of AI tools. As these tools become more and more a part of our life, we will be on the front lines of understanding their possibilities and consequences.
Cornerstone Integrated Liberal Arts
As the name implies, Cornerstone is a foundation of our pedagogical practice as a college. By its means we have addressed head-on some of the great challenges for this generation of students, whose attention, concentration, and relatedness to others have been under such assault from phones, social media, and the pandemic. But we will not rest on our laurels. The next stage is to go further in giving incoming students an opportunity to reset, to gain that ability to concentrate for extended periods which is becoming a veritable superpower. This will go hand in hand with our integration of the arts, humanities, and social sciences.