College of Liberal Arts

MESSAGE FROM THE DEAN

I am delighted to welcome you to the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) at Hawaii‘i Pacific University.  The importance of a liberal arts education is continuous and timeless.  In classical antiquity, a liberal arts education was considered essential to the promotion of freedom and to the development of the whole human being.  These roles have not changed and indeed have become even more imperative in the modern world. A liberal arts education is key in preparing students for a lifetime of learning and career development in a rapidly changing world.  We simply cannot predict what the jobs for the future will be but what we do know, and what employers attest to, is that the most valuable skills in the future will be those that machines cannot easily replicate such as creativity, critical thinking, curiosity, adaptability, and collaboration. 

These skills will be at the heart of your experience in the College of Liberal Arts. Our dedication to small class sizes, experiential learning, and interdisciplinarity, will foster skills vital to successfully negotiating a world full of complexity and ambiguity and one which demands innovation and flexibility.  They will also furnish you with the tools to have a lifetime of meaningful work, not merely employment. Our alumni enter almost every imaginable field from app designing to medicine, public service, law, high tech, and teaching. Our outstanding faculty prepare students to be competitive at the world's top graduate schools.  And we do all of this while cultivating the value of ohana that makes the college a very special place to study.  

No matter what your major, your experience with us will illuminate your world, expand your horizons and make you stand out from the crowd!  I hope you will make the College of Liberal Arts an important part of your HPU adventure.

Allison J. Gough, Ph.D.,
Dean, College of Liberal Arts