man wearing glasses and a gray suit and green tie with his arms crossed smiling at the camera

Download a PDF of the 2015 Fall Planning Letter.

The College of Arts & Letters (CAL) at Michigan State University aspires to be a national leader in arts and humanities research and education for the 21st century. This involves, above all, generating the resources required to attract, recruit, support, and retain the best, most innovative and most diverse faculty and graduate students in the arts and humanities. Faculty research and teaching are at the heart of a leading-edge arts and humanities education in which the enduring strengths of the liberal arts—excellent communication, critical thinking, ethical imagination, and global engagement—combine with new and emerging scholarship committed to digital fluency, civic leadership, and innovation to deepen our understanding of the world and address the most complex challenges of our time.

The College’s strategic initiatives over the next five years will integrate these new commitments with our existing and developing excellence in the arts and humanities. To achieve this, we will pursue priorities that build strength in units across the College by enhancing faculty research and creative activity, improving graduate education, and enriching the undergraduate experience. Our priorities are four: culturally engaged digital humanities; engaged scholarship in an interconnected world; integrated design; and media arts.

Because these priorities emerged from unit level strategic planning, they extend across the College. However, if everything is a priority, nothing is; so we must invest strategically and boldly in these four priority areas to move the College to a position of national leadership and heightened scholarly and pedagogical impact even as we continue to support and promote the core strengths of an arts and humanities education.