School of Arts and Science

Mission Statement

The School of Arts and Science supports the mission of Iona College through its commitment to academic excellence and education in the liberal arts tradition. A community of teacher-scholars devoted to academic excellence, the School of Arts and Science seeks, through the departments that comprise it, to provide all students with an educational foundation that is both traditional and contemporary. Through its major programs at the undergraduate and graduate levels, the School offers courses of study in the traditional liberal arts disciplines and appropriate pre-professional and professional programs that provide academic challenge and intellectual depth, and are rooted in liberal learning. Beyond its own inherent values, such broadly-based education serves especially well the needs of students who will be employed in a rapidly evolving work environment and may change careers several times.

Career-oriented students in the pre-professional and professional programs of the School profit from the liberal arts environment where these programs thrive. They also benefit by taking, along with their career programs, elective and required liberal arts courses that present diverse values, stimulate reflection, and enrich the intellectual life of those students.

In furtherance of these commitments, the School of Arts and Science strives to:

• provide an education that is current, student-centered, outcome-based, and involves an appropriate mix of classroom instruction, independent research, and internship or practical experience;
• equip students with the skills necessary for success in a rapidly changing environment: critical thinking, effective oral and written communication, analysis, problem solving, ethical decision making, computer competency, and scientific and technological literacy;
• instill in students the habits of mind enabling them to possess our most precious human heritage: those ideas, beliefs and writings that are the basis of intellectual, cultural and moral development;
• deepen student self-awareness, reflectiveness, and commitment to a core value that will illuminate both their personal relationships and their relationship to a diverse society with the qualities of intelligence, tolerance, decency and compassion; and
• recruit, retain and support the development of a faculty of exceptional teacher-scholars whose pedagogy is informed by research, experience and scholarship.

Courses