Happy New Year! 2024 was a banner year for the College of Humanities, Arts & Social Sciences (CHASS)! We kicked off the year with our new name celebrated at a Welcome Bash where we hosted nearly 300 friends from across campus. As co-celebrant for Celebrate Spirit!, our College practice of radical hospitality serves as the university’s theme for the year. The Discover Detroit immersion series began with 200 CHASS faculty, students, staff, and alumni cheering on the Tigers as they clinched their wild card spot. Our enrollments soared as CHASS faculty delivered outstanding courses, curated immersion experiences, and supported students, along with our staff, as they reach for the magis, the more.
2025 holds great opportunities for the College. The Black Box Theatre will be completed by April with the Detroit Mercy Theatre Company (DTMC) opening its 55th season here on the McNichols campus in Fall 2025. We are working toward ensuring that all CHASS students can engage in at least one high impact practice, ranging from an internship or immersion to a practicum or community engaged learning course. Plans for establishing a Humanities Institute are underway. CHASS is a community where ideas, goals, dreams, and hopes become realities. The hard work, intellectual curiosity, and commitment to the transformations made possible through a liberal arts education that drive us all make this possible.
The year ahead is also one of great uncertainty as national, state, and local leadership transitions will occur. Genocide, war, conflict, and violence in the Middle East, Europe, Africa, and elsewhere, including here in the US, continue. This context creates a generally heightened state of anxiety and stress the reads, though differentially, onto us all.
In this season of resolutions, as we fully recognize this broader context, let’s resolve to hold onto our value that diversity is our strength, our practice of radical hospitality, and our belief in the liberal arts as critical to advancing the free thinking necessary for democratic society.