January 2020
Dear Arts & Letters Community:
Happy New Year and welcome to the Spring 2020 Semester! Spring semester is when you can experience some of our largest and most popular annual events. These include: the campus-wide celebration of the Humanities and Arts on National Humanities Advocacy Day: Eagle-Con, a three-day convention that brings together science fiction, fantasy, comic books, and superheroes; and the annual Jean Burden Poetry Reading, which this year features Marilyn Chin. In addition to these, we have new exhibits in the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery, theatre and dance performances, music concerts, philosophical debates, and much more! The College of Arts & Letters event calendar is updated each week.
Shortly before winter break, the leadership of the College of Arts & Letters held a half-day retreat on the downtown LA campus to talk about our dreams for the college both big and less big. One theme pervaded every conversation over the five hours: student success. The faculty and administrative leadership of the College are taking an integrated approach to supporting your success from pre-college programming with community partners, through first-year academic advising, to professionally-focused capstone experiences, all the way to alumni engagement. While it will take quite a while to bring the big dreams to fruition (like new or refurbished facilities), we are already taking some small steps to make our dreams a reality. This includes providing more professional development opportunities next year on the heels of our very successful, “Connect the Dots” event last fall, augmenting our curricular maps with co-curricular maps, and bringing more alumni to campus to meet with students.
As you begin the new semester, remember to study hard, eat well, and get enough sleep. And, if you are among the many students and friends of the College who celebrate the Lunar New Year (or even if you don’t), I wish you all a future of both prosperity and peace.
Warm best wishes,
Dr. Linda Essig, Dean