Accepted Student Days, Registration and Orientation

Next week our current students will begin to make their course selection for Fall ’09 and soon the members of the class of 2013 will do the same. I would like to take a moment to thank faculty members and department chairs in the College for all the work it took to build the liberal arts offerings from which students will select. While there is some concern about particular areas of study or electives that will not be offered next year, many of those gaps are only temporary and I would like to point out some of the curricular innovations being introduced in CAS this coming year, even at a time of duress:
* For the first time, students will be able to declare a Global Studies Major
*Students will be able to begin or continue their study of Arabic and
take classes in Portuguese
*A residential Integrated Fine Arts Program will be launched this fall in the
College that parallels our very successful programs in the Humanities, Studies
of Earth and the Environment, and the Social Sciences
*We look forward to welcoming a diverse cohort of new faculty (see the CAS
homepage, where we have already begun to load pix and bios) with expertise
and course offerings in the following departments: Romance Languages, History,
Art and Art History, Religion and Physics.
*We will also have a new Henderson Fellow in Romance Languages from Guadaloupe.
That the College was able to consider curricular innovation under the extraordinary financial conditions that we have found ourselves in is a credit to the creativity and hard work of faculty members across the College and across all disciplines. As you move ahead with advising our students in the coming weeks and months, please reassure them that, despite what they might have been led to believe or read in the newspaper or on line or seen on TV, as the preceding innovations suggest, the College of Arts and Sciences is a vibrant, enduring and supportive intellectual community at the heart of what we know will continue to be for them a wonderful academic experience.

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