It’s been almost 30 years since I arrived at the University of Chicago in 1996 as a junior faculty member in the Department of English Language and Literature. In my many roles during that time, I’ve had a front-row seat to two striking examples of our University’s excellence: the enduring centrality of the humanities in the transformative UChicago experience, and the flowering of world-class artistic practice and production, which has made our University and the South Side of Chicago a national and global destination for the arts.

Over the past 15 years, while degrees in the arts and humanities have declined nationally, our University has remained an outlier. Since 2010 the percentage of UChicago undergraduates who earn a degree in the humanities has remained steady, with an average of 30 percent of students earning a major or minor in departments and programs in the arts and humanities.

Part of the reason that our family of disciplines remains central to UChicago is the preeminence of our award-winning faculty, who continue to shape the future of graduate education while devoting themselves to teaching in the College and the Core.

The Humanities Core, Arts Core, and language acquisition are foundational to the University’s vision of an intellectually dynamic college education. Students experience illuminating possibilities born of analyzing cultures around the world and across time and studying ancient and modern languages, from Akkadian to Swahili. They master truth seeking while reading and synthesizing material—texts, ideas, music, art—from perspectives that can seem initially novel or foreign but soon become part of their toolkit to make sense of complex problems, form connections with other people, and build an intellectual and aesthetic home in the world.

Truly rare is the student, in any unit across campus, undergraduate or graduate, who has not found joyful, deeply meaningful experiences by joining a musical ensemble, such as the University Symphony Orchestra, or one of the more than 60 student-driven performing arts organizations. And so many of these experiences are part of the vibrant activity of the Reva and David Logan Center for the Arts.

Symbiotic with the student desire for arts practice and production, faculty in cinema and media studies, creative writing, music, theater and performance studies, and visual arts have emerged as some of the brightest stars in their fields: the composer Augusta Read Thomas; the multimedia artist Theaster Gates; the late performance artist Pope.L; and two of our recent MacArthur winners, the film scholar Jacqueline Stewart, AM’93, PhD’99, who will be filming episodes of Silent Sunday Nights for Turner Classic Movies on locations across campus throughout the year, and the novelist Ling Ma, AB’05.

While the arts and humanities remain central to UChicago’s stature as one of the world’s great universities, we are sensitive to the larger challenges facing higher education. We embrace the opportunity to be more publicly engaged, to demonstrate the impact of our scholars and artists. I am strategically optimistic about our ability to seed a future of human flourishing by providing life-affirming knowledge and art. In times of unprecedented strains on the planet and our collective lives, true leadership requires multiple fluencies: in language, culture, interpretation, and creative intelligence.

This year we are formally changing the name of the division to the Division of the Arts & Humanities to better reflect a more integrated, expansive, and outward-facing division that embraces the full breadth of humanistic inquiry and creativity. The accompanying administrative changes will better align our arts units with academic departments, providing sites of collaboration to catalyze transdisciplinary explorations of history, theory, and practice.

Over the summer we will complete the internal housekeeping that comes with renaming the division, and in August we will relaunch our divisional website to reflect our new name. I invite you to visit artshumanities.uchicago.edu to read more highlights from this academic year and sign up for news and events from the division.