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Arts
Arts employ conscious use of learned skill and creative imagination in the ideation, production, and analysis of artistic or cultural objects or performances. A flexible category with many disciplines, the arts produce outcomes that range from utilitarian-designed objects to work emphasizing values that stand outside conventional ideas of utility. Engaging with the arts at the university level invokes critical thinking skills, multicultural understanding, and human empathy. Students participating in the creation and critique of cultural objects and performances develop and broaden their individual outlooks which in turn expand and influence the scope of human culture.
Humanities
Courses in the Humanities aim to build humane values for life in civil society. They investigate constructs and values through disciplines concerned with questions, concepts, and contexts basic to the formation of character and the establishment of humanistic values. Students engage in literary, aesthetic, and intellectual experiences to cultivate, refine, and integrate their faculties of emotion, thought, and body. Therefore, courses in this category present students with a humanistic experience aimed at fostering appreciation for diverse traditions, cultures, and aesthetics. Students also apply humanistic perspectives to other branches of knowledge and issues of enduring human concern to better understand the interrelationship between creative arts, humanities, and the self.
