The Department of Anthropology/Sociology is firmly committed to the principles of a liberal education. Our task is to provide students with the most rigorous and comprehensive approaches to knowledge and analysis appropriate within a fully merged undergraduate program in Sociology and Anthropology.
Our commitment to teaching also defines for us the importance of active scholarship through which we may practice our disciplines and encourage similar pursuits among our students. Since our graduates enter into a wide range of professional, administrative, policy-oriented and other occupations, our goal is to transmit, foster, and produce knowledge and practice that involve students in their own learning experience. In this respect we want to encourage students to take their education into their own hands, by helping them to engage personally in research, analysis, and writing about diverse human societies.
We have therefore sought to create a learning environment within which students may critically examine social life, its organization, and its meaning. We believe that the development of a perspective that examines the human condition in empirical, analytical, comparative, historical, and holistic terms makes a significant contribution to intellectual development. In pursuing such a goal, we assist students to develop, integrate, and utilize knowledge. To this end our mission is to produce knowledgeable learners and social agents who have a self-reflective sense of their potential contributions to the enhancement of the human condition.