130 Years of Liberal Arts at Georgia Tech

Editors Note: The College celebrated 130 years of liberal arts at Tech in 2018. Though a number of the faculty and students in this video have retired (includingthen dean, Jacqueline Royster) or graduated, we continue to share this video because it provides a wonderful historical perspective on the College and its mission.

In the fall of 1967, amid growing disquietude over war, environmental destruction, dehumanizing technology, and man’s shrinking place in the cosmos, The Technique student newspaper threw a rhetorical brick through the front window of the Georgia Institute of Technology.

“In the age of overkill and napalm, missiles and anti-missiles, moonshots and sonic booms, the unbridled exploitation of science and technology has become a threat to the very existence of the species,” went an editorial in an October 1967 edition calling for a “degree-granting college in the humanities” at Georgia Tech.

“The technicians have shown what they can do,” the editorial continued. “It is now time for the truly educated man capable of making the moral choice to enter the field.”

Since those formative years, the Ivan Allen College of Liberal Arts has blossomed into a center of innovative interdisciplinary scholarship that links computing, engineering, and science with culturally informed viewpoints and ethically grounded inquiries. From this crossroads, faculty and students consider the implications of policies and actions in the lives of human beings and create sustainable solutions for a better world.