The study of the humanities offers particular insights into the human condition by training young minds to make intellectual, aesthetic, moral, and spiritual sense of the world, and encouraging all members of an intellectual community to think critically about our connections to the lives of others–past, present and future.

The Humanities

– explain ourselves to ourselves.

– connect us to those who came before, as well as to our contemporaries.

– facilitate cross-cultural understanding, by helping us to hold difficult conversations about race, class, gender,

   and difference.

– demand critical reading, thinking, and writing.

– remain rooted in the rigor of distinct disciplines, but depend on multidisciplinary inquiry and collaboration.

– tackle the big questions humans have asked for millennia: how do we make sense of existence?

– employ qualitative methods to learn how humans have documented and expressed themselves over time and

   space.

– provide tools for resolving challenges we face in the present, from climate change and political instability, to

   growing inequality and the increasing centrality of technology to everyday life.

– connect past and present thought and expression while also considering the possibilities of the future.

– teach visual literacy.

– explore personal artistic expression, from verbal to visual to performative, from static to time-based, from

   two-dimensional to three.

– explore the institutions, belief systems, and other frameworks people have used to make sense of their

   worlds.

– expand creativity in written, digital and analog mediums.

– embrace technology, while also interrogating humans’ relationships with and use of that technology.

– foster social justice, equality, and empathy.