Educating the Leaders Our Region Needs

WHY A GOOD EDUCATION IN THE ARTS, HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES PREPARES STUDENTS TO THINK, CONNECT, CONTRIBUTE AND SHAPE THE FUTURE

As the Dean of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, I am often asked why our disciplines matter in a world increasingly shaped by technology, data, and artificial intelligence. My answer is simple: the future will not be led by people who only know how to use powerful tools. It will be led by people who understand people.

Arts, Humanities and Social Science education develops precisely that competence. It teaches students to ask difficult questions, listen carefully to perspectives different from their own, recognize complexity, communicate with clarity, and imagine possibilities that do not yet exist. These are not simply academic skills. They are the foundations of leadership.

A strong leader must understand history to realize how we arrived at the present. Leaders need philosophy and ethics to consider what ought to be done, not simply what can be done. They benefit from literature, languages, and the arts to encounter experiences beyond their own and to develop empathy and imagination. They grow from the ability to interpret culture, evaluate competing claims, and communicate ideas in ways that inspire others to act.

In other words, education in these fields prepares students not just for their first job, but for the many roles they will occupy throughout their lives as professionals, neighbors, parents, citizens, entrepreneurs, educators, and community leaders.

This mission is especially meaningful at Florida Atlantic University. FAU is our region’s hometown university: an institution deeply connected to the communities of South Florida and invested in their future. Our students do not simply study in this region; they are part of it. Many will build their careers here, raise families here, create businesses here, serve in public institutions here, and shape the cultural and civic life of our communities for decades to come.

That gives a public university like ours a special responsibility. We must prepare students not only to flourish in a changing economy, but also to contribute meaningfully to the place they call home.

The Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences are central to that work. Our region is wonderfully multicultural, rapidly changing, and full of both opportunity and challenge. Its future will require leaders who can work across differences, understand the histories and aspirations of their neighbors, and bring people together around shared purposes. It will require imagination as much as expertise.

At FAU, we believe education should extend beyond the classroom. A university is at its best when it is in conversation with the community that sustains it. That is why our public programming matters so much. Through lectures, exhibitions, performances, conversations, readings, screenings, and other events, we invite our neighbors to join us in the intellectual and creative life of the university.

These gatherings are more than opportunities to hear from an expert or experience a work of art. They are spaces for civic dialogue. They give us opportunities to encounter new ideas, reconsider familiar assumptions, and engage one another across the boundaries that can too easily divide us.

Art itself can be a powerful form of civic engagement. An exhibition, performance, film, literary work, or musical composition can help us see our community, and ourselves, in a new way. These artistic interventions enrich and enliven public life because they create experiences that cannot always be captured in a spreadsheet or reduced to a policy brief. They invite reflection, provoke conversation, and sometimes challenge us to imagine a different future.

A hometown university should be a place where a community comes together to think, create, question, and imagine. The future leaders of our region are already here. Our responsibility is to help them become not only capable professionals, but thoughtful citizens, and to ensure that the university remains a vibrant gathering place where our entire community can participate in creating the future we want to share.

To this end, I invite our neighbors throughout South Florida to be part of that mission. Come to our programs. Attend a performance. Visit an exhibition. Join a lecture or public conversation. Bring your questions, your experiences, and your perspectives.

See you on campus, soon!

Michael J. Horswell, Ph.D. is the Dean of the Dorothy F. Schmidt College of Arts and Letters at Florida Atlantic University, where he has provided academic and strategic leadership since 2017. A professor of Spanish and Latin American Literature, he advances interdisciplinary education across the arts, humanities and social sciences while strengthening the College’s connection to and impact throughout South Florida.