“The arts and humanities really saturate everything we do here on campus,” MSU College of Arts & Letters dean Chris Long tells Michigan State University President Lou Anna K. Simon and Spartans Athletic Director Mark Hollis on MSU Today. Long feels “a 21st century land grant mission is informed by the liberal arts.”

One of Long’s key goals for the college is to attract the best faculty members he can.

“It’s a challenge to find the person who is a real triple threat who can do the research at a serious level, who can do the teaching with integrity and passion and bring and draw students into the transformative experience that the arts and humanities can be, and then who understands the service mission of the university, too,” Long says. “One of the great things about being at the pioneer land grant university is that we have a commitment to bringing education out into the world and to allowing our work to be informed by the world as it responds to us.”

Ultimately, the important thing from my perspective is how we help students craft a meaningful life for themselves…

Part of what Long sees the arts and humanities “bringing is those deeper values of what it means to be human to a situation in which we’re being transformed by technologies that are so present to us at all times.

“So we need to both understand the technologies really well, and bring those traditional values of the liberal arts to bear on them.”

Long feels that students today “are increasingly interested in engaging the world more broadly and thinking about bigger questions and issues that are facing us as a society.

“Ultimately, the important thing from my perspective is how we help students craft a meaningful life for themselves and to put themselves in a position to make a better world and to contribute and put their weight on the side of making the world better.”

To listen to Dean Long’s conversation please visit SpartanPodcasts.

This article originally released on SpartanPodcasts.com.