Our Mission

The College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences fosters an open intellectual environment where faculty, staff, and students pursue inquiry through wide-ranging research, scholarship, and creative activity. It provides its faculty, staff, and students with a capacity to respond with intelligence and integrity to an ever-changing world. It helps each member of the faculty, staff, and students to prepare for further education, for professional development, and for public life. It presents opportunities for faculty, staff, and students to cultivate themselves as humans, working toward self-knowledge that results in better human relationships and a more just society. The College enacts this mission in collaboration with disciplines, departments, and other units across the university, as well as in partnership with our local, regional, and global communities.

Our Vision

The College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences envisions a future with three dimensions:

In our relationship with our students:

• A robust collection of undergraduate and graduate programs (majors, minors, and certificates) that serve a diverse body of students as they prepare to change the world.
• A healthy offering of liberal education courses that gives every student at UMD an opportunity to explore the depth of the human experience.

In our relationship with our students and with each other:

• A mix of staff, term faculty, and tenure-line faculty who work together as members of a community to meet the College’s missions in teaching, research, and service.
• A set of workshops, professional development opportunities, and resources for distributing internal and securing external funding that supports the work of the College’s students, faculty and staff.

In our relationship with our communities:

• An array of centers for research, creative activity, and community engagement; performance programming; and festivals, and other initiatives that connect faculty and students to the region, to the community, and to the disciplines that connect us across the globe.
• A partnership with our alumni, who serve as collaborative leaders in their families, their professions, and their communities, enacting the values manifest in the College.
• A region and state that is energized with those values and led by our former students.