Department of Behavioral Sciences

The College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters is the intellectual core of the campus.  In the College, a distinguished faculty of teacher-scholars aims to cultivate the intellectual abilities of a diverse and talented student body and to enlarge, refine, and deepen their awareness and knowledge.  Through traditional degrees and such distinctive programs as cooperative education, undergraduate research, and interdisciplinary honors, the College emphasizes both the practical and the cerebral side of the liberal arts.  In collaboration with the professional schools, it prepares students for the professions while helping them toward an understanding of human values and ethics.  In partnership with the broader academic community, its faculty contribute significantly to the creation, application, and dissemination of knowledge.  In addition, it provides significant service to the University and the wider community.

As part of its educational objectives, CASL will offer a broadly based liberal arts education that provides basic knowledge for career choices and a foundation for ethical and moral behavior.

As was true in Paris and Bologna in the fourteenth century and as is true in Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and Dearborn the twentieth, liberal arts colleges are the sine qua non of universities.  The pre-eminence of the College of Literature, Science, and the Arts at Ann Arbor is mirrored in the status of the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters at Dearborn.  The reason for this pre-eminence of liberal arts colleges is not difficult to ascertain.  Together, they share an ideal, a goal: the cultivation of students’ intellectual abilities, the refining of their sensibilities, the enlargement and deepening of their awareness and knowledge.

In mathematics and the natural sciences, emphasis is placed on rational, analytical, conceptual thinking and on mastery of precise methods of inquiry, especially experimentation that produces results that may be replicated.

In the humanities, methodology is equally important, but it is less exclusively rational, because the study of art, literature, and music depends on the manner--partly emotional, partly imaginative--in which these are experienced.

The social and behavioral sciences offer a political, social, economic, psychological, and cultural storehouse from which students can draw in order to understand the past, cope with the present, and design the future.

In the College of Arts, Sciences, and Letters, emphasis is not placed on specific preparation for a narrow career track, but rather on providing a broad-based liberal arts background which, in addition to the disciplines noted above, offers an ethical and moral foundation from which graduates may grow.  The basic core of knowledge will aid in their vocational career choices and continue to influence our graduates throughout their lives.  Facts in many occupations may have a life of less than a decade; values endure for a lifetime.