SAS Horizons | Pathways for a Changing World

SAS Horizons | Pathways for a Changing World
SAS
Horizons
Pathways for a Changing World
Horizons
speaks to the clarity of purpose with which we at the School of Arts & Sciences chart our collective future and our confidence in the possibilities that lie just beyond sight.
At a moment of sweeping change for society and higher education,
Horizons
reflects how we broaden opportunities for our students, empower scholars to venture beyond the boundaries of current knowledge, and channel discoveries into new avenues that allow society to see further and reach higher.
Aligned with the University’s strategic framework,
In Principle and Practice
Horizons
positions the School to continue its essential role in advancing Penn’s highest priorities.
This document begins by articulating what grounds us and how we approach our work. We then outline a focused set of priorities and action pathways to advance the School of Arts & Sciences’ mission in the years ahead.
Who We Are
Our Priorities
Who We Are
The School of Arts & Sciences is a community centered on teaching, learning, engaging, and exploring.
At the School of Arts & Sciences we:
Cultivate excellence and empathy
By empowering our faculty, staff, and students to pursue the highest standards in all that we do, while engaging across differences with respect and care.
Embrace a dynamic and uncertain world
By instilling in all members of our community the insight, skills, and resolve to anticipate change, adapt with confidence, and lead with purpose.
Unlock brilliance and potential
By igniting intellectual ambitions and fostering creativity, discovery, and impact.
Place our shared humanity at the center of our work to create a better future for all
By advancing knowledge, understanding, ethical action, and public trust in service of the common good.
Our Guiding Principles
As we chart a course for the School,
curiosity
discovery
, and
connection
serve as points of orientation across changing contexts. Together, they express the ethos that shapes how we view our mission to educate our students, pursue research, and engage one another and the wider world.
Curiosity
Curiosity
is the starting point of our students’ intellectual paths and the unifying force behind faculty research in every discipline. We cultivate openness to speculative endeavors; we value inquiry that looks beyond immediate application; and we encourage students and scholars to ask informed, imaginative, and challenging questions.
Discovery
Discovery
lies at the heart of our work in generating foundational knowledge. Across archives, laboratories, field sites, and studios, we pursue multiple modes of discovery, from theoretical and creative work to qualitative, experimental, data-driven, and applied. Because transformative advances rarely follow a linear path, we affirm the importance of broad inquiry as the source for future breakthroughs in all professions and pursuits.
Connection
Connection
reflects our belief that knowledge gains strength when it bridges people, disciplines, and differences. Interdisciplinary connections spark new ideas, while connections between classroom learning and real-world experiences prepare students for their lives after Penn. Beyond campus, connecting our research with the world we seek to understand serves communities while ensuring the rigor of our work.
Our Foundational Commitments
The School’s success depends not just on shared priorities, but on how we approach our work. These two foundational commitments establish the conditions that allow the School to navigate change, sustain excellence, and translate knowledge into meaningful action.
Fostering Community, Culture, and Belonging
A thriving academic community requires a foundation of respect, inclusion, and genuine engagement across differences. We aspire to create a culture where the contributions of each of our students, faculty, and staff are appreciated, and where we work together with trust to drive shared accomplishment.
Partnering with the Public
The School recognizes the importance of trust in expertise and in higher education. We are committed to sharing our work openly and to making the knowledge we generate accessible, credible, and impactful. This commitment will shape how we support both public scholarship across the School and engagement with our local communities and around the world.
Our Priorities
Guided by our principles and commitments, we have identified three priorities and coordinating pathways for action that position the School to navigate a changing world with clarity and intention.
Our broad priorities are:
Affirming Arts & Sciences as Penn’s Intellectual Core
As the home of fundamental fields of inquiry, the School cultivates the perspectives, methods, and frameworks that fulfill the promise of the arts and sciences and are essential to the University’s goals and vision. Research and teaching in the basic sciences lay the groundwork for future breakthroughs. Our social scientists provide analytical underpinnings for effective policy and practice initiatives. The work of our humanities faculty deepens understanding of meaning and value and provides essential interpretive and ethical foundations. Together, these strengths elevate the University’s most ambitious work.
This breadth positions the School to shape and advance the University-wide priorities articulated by
In Principle and Practice
. We address the
climate
emergency in all its dimensions, from measuring Earth’s environment and advancing energy research to confronting food security and environmental justice. Our faculty illuminate the conditions that strengthen civic life and the forces that threaten
democracy
. Across disciplines, we bring powerful resources to improving human
health
and well-being, from basic science research that drives biomedical innovation to scholarship that reveals the social and structural determinants of health. Our scholars also shape understanding of the intellectual, ethical, and societal dimensions of data-based inquiry and artificial intelligence, while advancing discovery through both the study and application of
AI
. The School is home to departments and centers that study cultures around the world, enriching global engagement across Penn. Alongside this work, programs in the creative and performing arts cultivate artistic practice and critical interpretation, enriching the cultural life of our campus and the wider community.
We are committed to maintaining the broad disciplinary strength and deep interdisciplinary connections that position the School to shape and support Penn’s accomplishments in these, and other, critical areas.
Cultivating Human Creativity, Judgment, and Inquiry
The School of Arts & Sciences cultivates forms of intelligence that transcend algorithmic reasoning: creativity, judgment, ethical thinking, and the capacity to discern which questions matter and why. Through social analysis, scientific investigation, humanistic inquiry, and engagement in the arts, the School advances ways of knowing that help interpret experience, evaluate evidence, and make sense of change. These abilities are essential to public life in an era of rapid technological and social transformation.
Developing these capacities depends on both disciplinary strength and interdisciplinary connections. By enhancing ties and engaging questions raised by emerging technologies and cultural change, Arts & Sciences creates the conditions for sustained inquiry and dialogue, ensuring that innovation and discovery are guided by human understanding and serve the common good.
Educating for Complexity
The School of Arts & Sciences prepares its students and scholars for a world of rapid transformation, positioning them not only to respond to social, technological, and global change but to shape that change. We cultivate habits of inquiry, judgment, empathy, and dialogue, in the process equipping learners to ask rigorous questions, engage complexity and competing perspectives, and apply knowledge with responsibility and care.
Preparing students to navigate complexity requires learning that extends beyond the classroom.
Across our undergraduate, graduate, and lifelong
programs, we
link intellectual rigor with
research, community engagement, and partnership, connecting students to the systems and institutions they seek to understand.
In a moment when urgent challenges demand integrated thinking and responsible leadership, we advance a vision that transforms curiosity into insight and learning into action, ensuring that education in the arts and sciences remains vital, relevant, and enduring.
Pathways for Action
We have identified a series of frameworks and initiatives to translate the School’s shared priorities into focused action, advancing our mission and moving us with clarity toward the horizons ahead.
These pathways include:
Advancing Strategic Themes
Enhancing Teaching Across the Learning Continuum
Strengthening the Research Ecosystem
Connecting Scholarship and Society
Advancing Strategic Themes
The Future of the Humanities
The School will establish a hub to strengthen humanistic knowledge and inquiry at Penn. Drawing together and expanding the work of existing centers and programs, the Future of the Humanities initiative will create an intellectual space that fosters sustained conversation among humanities scholars and deepens connections with colleagues in the social and natural sciences.
Initial activities will include faculty forums and working groups, humanities-led engagement with emerging technologies, and collaborative projects that open new pathways for interpretive and historical understanding. Its programming will support research, teaching, graduate education, and faculty development. Major themes of inquiry will include technological change, global interconnection, and evolving cultural conditions. It will also link faculty and students to the greater Philadelphia community through outreach projects and partnerships with schools and area cultural organizations.
AI & Data Across SAS
Artificial intelligence and data science are fundamentally reshaping the parameters of culture and knowledge. At SAS, faculty and programs in a range of disciplines are already exploring the potential of these tools and working to understand their intellectual, ethical, and societal implications. To advance our work at these new frontiers, we will establish the AI & Data Across SAS Collaborative. Guided by a faculty-led advisory structure and leveraging the work of the School’s Data Driven Discovery Initiative, the AI & Data Collaborative will advance a unified framework for research, teaching, and engagement in AI and data science.
The Collaborative will convene undergraduates and faculty, along with cohorts of postdoctoral fellows and graduate students, to explore questions ranging from how systems encode language, creativity, power, and values to how individuals and societies shape and respond to emerging technologies. It will also establish structured opportunities for interaction with technology practitioners and organizational leaders, grounding inquiry in real-world contexts.
AI & Data Across SAS will support a coordinated approach to undergraduate AI education, ensuring that students across all majors have the opportunity to examine artificial intelligence as a subject of critical inquiry and a tool for discovery. Extending the reach of existing minors, this effort will expand curricular and co-curricular pathways and create new points of connection across disciplines. The program will support the development of AI-enhanced coursework and opportunities for students to apply AI methods thoughtfully within their chosen fields, integrating AI literacy into a broad arts and sciences education.
Climate, Society, and the Future World
Climate, Society, and the Future World establishes a School-wide framework for climate-related research, education, collaboration, and engagement. We will leverage existing strengths such as the Vagelos Institute for Energy Science and Technology, as well as expertise across the School in climate science, population and health studies, politics and policy, and environmental inquiry. In addition, a central pillar of this work will entail expanding and elevating the Plant Adaptability and Resilience Center, dedicated to addressing climate impacts on plant life and food security. We will also enhance the School’s essential role in convening campus-wide and public programming, leading the way in capturing the human experience of climate change in our society, and supporting climate engagement and action. These activities will amplify the School of Arts & Sciences’ impact in advancing climate knowledge grounded in social science insights, humanistic interpretation, and scientific inquiry.
Global Contexts
To coordinate and enhance our global efforts, we will establish Global Contexts as a School-wide organizing structure. Understanding the world requires sustained attention to how people live within it: their cultures, histories, and social and political contexts. The School of Arts & Sciences has long led in this work through the depth of its area studies programs, along with global engagement and scholarship spanning the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Global Contexts will link faculty expertise, research, engagement, and teaching around shared questions of people and place. It will serve as a locus for intellectual exchange within the School and as a catalyst for collaboration across Penn, connecting scholars and students whose work intersects with global questions.
By providing a structure for supporting convenings, research, curricular coordination, and shared resources, Global Contexts will foster sustained collaboration across regions, disciplines, and schools, support new directions in comparative and interdisciplinary study, and preserve the depth and rigor that define Arts & Sciences scholarship.
Enhancing Teaching Across the Learning Continuum
A Bold Vision for the Undergraduate Experience
The College of Arts & Sciences will complete its ambitious effort to renew the undergraduate curriculum, ensuring that the undergraduate experience aligns with how students learn and prepare for lives of purpose in a complex world. Through this renewal, we will foster our students’ growth as independent thinkers who can navigate complex questions across disciplines and perspectives. We will implement a curriculum that encourages exploration before specialization while providing structure, coherence, and clearer pathways from curiosity to mastery. At the same time, we will preserve what defines an arts and sciences education at its best—rigorous inquiry, intellectual openness, and breadth alongside depth—while expanding opportunities for meaningful engagement through research, internships, and service.
The new curriculum will shape how our students acquire and integrate knowledge, providing a strong foundation for their future contributions to a thoughtful, connected, and resilient society.
A Focus on the Future of Graduate Education
Graduate students are essential contributors to every aspect of the School’s core mission, from advancing new paths of inquiry to teaching and public engagement. Amid rapid changes in the landscape of higher education, SAS is embracing the imperative to build resilient support structures that sustain excellence and propel discovery. We will elevate scholarship by developing robust disciplinary and cross-disciplinary skills, equipping our graduates to meet the challenges of a changing world. SAS graduate education will prepare students for success across a wide range of careers, cultivate the next generation of scholars, and drive innovation across all sectors of society.
A Strategic Expansion of Lifelong Learning
Arts & Sciences will expand flexible offerings, from high school through post-retirement, that support the intellectual, personal, and professional growth of students across the learning lifespan. The School of Arts & Sciences is the historic home of lifelong learning at Penn, and with roots dating back to 1892, the College of Liberal & Professional Studies is the Ivy League’s oldest continuing education program. Today, the School is dedicated to serving an increasingly diverse range of students through the College of Liberal & Professional Studies’ innovative programs. We will significantly expand our certificate offerings at all levels, particularly by connecting core strengths in climate, AI, psychology, and behavioral sciences to interdisciplinary lifelong learning. These programs will provide learners with both standalone opportunities and pathways to an expanded suite of graduate offerings that build on the School’s distinctive areas of expertise.
Strengthening the Research Ecosystem
The Dean’s Horizons Fund
To sustain bold inquiry and position the School to lead in a changing research landscape, we will establish the Dean’s Horizons Fund as a flexible new resource to advance and accelerate scholarship across the social sciences, humanities, and natural sciences. The Fund will support ambitious questions, new collaborations, and emerging avenues of exploration through philanthropic investment in the full ecosystem that enables research, including graduate students and the shared infrastructure that sustains inquiry.
Research excellence depends not only on the distinction of our faculty, but on the conditions that allow scholarship to flourish across disciplines. As research funding models evolve, Arts & Sciences must not simply adapt but anticipate change by strengthening our capacity to support the people, resources, and ideas that define the next generation of knowledge.
By creating a more flexible and forward-looking model to sustain this work, the Dean’s Horizons Fund ensures that Arts & Sciences remains resilient, intellectually ambitious, and prepared to shape the future of research.
The Physical Sciences Complex Project
As Penn’s home for foundational science—and the place where thousands of students are educated each year in fields critical to the future of science, technology, and medicine—Arts & Sciences has a responsibility to sustain world-class research and to educate students who will drive innovation, expand knowledge, and address pressing challenges. The David Rittenhouse Laboratories, which house faculty and programs in Physics and Astronomy, Mathematics, and Earth and Environmental Science, is one of the most heavily used teaching facilities on campus, yet its mid-20th-century classrooms and labs no longer meet the demands of modern science.
Through our comprehensive Physical Sciences Complex project, we will create state-of-the-art laboratories, classrooms, and maker and collaborative spaces. This transformation is essential to attracting and retaining exceptional faculty, enabling bold interdisciplinary research, and providing students with an environment worthy of scientific education at the frontier. By renewing this core infrastructure, we position the School to educate for the future and to confront the defining challenges of our time.
Connecting Scholarship and Society
SAS Community Forum
The School will expand its commitment to programming that strengthens community among faculty, staff, and students by creating the SAS Community Forum. The SAS Community Forum will bring the School’s scholarly expertise to bear on current issues, offering perspective, analytical rigor, and ethical insight.
Evolving from initiatives such as
Living the Hard Promise
, the SAS Community Forum will create spaces for informed dialogue,
deepen shared understanding, reinforce the habits of reasoned exchange and empathy, and demonstrate the enduring relevance of Arts & Sciences scholarship to the challenges of our time.
The SAS Commons
To cultivate an intellectual space for faculty collaboration, foster sustained discourse around topics of enduring significance, and connect scholarship and expertise to the broader public, we will launch the SAS Commons Initiative. Over two years, the Initiative Director will lead a series of public lectures, symposia, and workshops that draw together the School’s diverse strengths around a single, timely theme. The initiative will connect to existing courses to encourage student engagement and will incorporate additional opportunities for students to explore the topic in depth. It will also include programming designed to engage broader audiences. By bridging disciplines and perspectives, the Commons will open new scholarly directions and advance knowledge that serves both the academy and the wider world.
Academic and Public Partnerships
Academic and Public Partnerships will provide a foundation for solutions in service of communities, from local to global, by expanding our commitment to scholarship that addresses pressing problems. Existing initiatives such as the Crime and Justice Policy Lab, City Lab, and the Penn Development Research Initiative-DevLab are among the many examples of SAS connections beyond campus. Partnerships like these bring together the School’s people and research with city and state governments, developing nations, and communities to co-create solutions.
By mapping existing engagements, supporting new collaborations, and elevating public-facing scholarship through events, publications, and convenings, Academic and Public Partnerships will add coherence and strengthen the impact of our collective work. In doing so, it will also advance discovery in areas central to Penn’s priorities, activate those discoveries to make meaningful change in communities and the world, and foster public trust in knowledge and expertise.
Return here for updates on how
SAS Horizons
is advancing our work.
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