College of Arts & Sciences

Welcome to the College of Arts & Sciences at EOU

Arts and Sciences faculty are the heart of the liberal arts degrees at Eastern Oregon University, serving both on-campus and distance education students. The faculty are deeply engaged in a learning partnership with their students, and also in laboratories, studios, theatres, music practice rooms, computing and writing facilities, and networked media all over campus and beyond.

The goal of the College of Arts and Sciences is to prepare our graduates for life in a complex society by providing each student with the opportunity to develop those characteristics that distinguish the educated citizen. The College provides students with the means of developing the following processes:

• to learn throughout life;
• to acquire information independently;
• to think clearly and critically;
• to analyze, interpret, and integrate knowledge purposefully; and
• to communicate effectively and creatively.

To achieve our liberal arts and sciences mission, the College fosters and features excellence and innovation in instruction, active and collaborative learning, independent student research and creativity, outreach and distance delivery of its programs, and interdisciplinary modes of learning. College programs ensure both depth and breadth of learning. Depth is realized through intense training in a major. Breadth results from the assimilation of the substance, approach, and insights of several different disciplines through minors and general education requirements.

Study of philosophy, mathematics, history, literature, art, music, drama and theatre, biology, chemistry, physics, modern languages, sociology, anthropology, geology, economics, psychology, computer science/multimedia studies, and media arts combines effectively with the four cornerstones of the EOU undergraduate experience - research, service learning, international experience, and internships - to allow us proudly to graduate students who are prepared for many aspects of life in a complex world. Arts and Sciences faculty know that by fostering and enabling the best talents and potentials of their students, they are making a profound contribution to the future.

One of the hallmarks of an EOU education is the extent to which faculty actively involve themselves in the students' educational process. This involvement is based on the deep learning our faculty have in their several disciplines and also on their own continuing growth and development, as they discover, create, research, and publish their contributions to the world's knowledge. Every EOU student has the opportunity to know one of these faculty members as a personal mentor.

The College of Arts and Sciences offers myriad opportunities for this personal attention - from the Grande Ronde Symphony to the Community Chorus, from the Chemistry Club to KEOL Radio, from collaborative art events to the Science Journal, from the herbarium to the electronic music studio, from Ars Poetica to the Indian Arts Festival. In all of these venues the faculty guide students into habits of critical and creative thinking, into effective writing and communication skills, into mastery of the venerable traditional subjects and new applications of these subjects in the world and the workplace.