About COLFA

The Humanities and Social Sciences Building is home to the College of Liberal and Fine Arts Dean's Office, the COLFA Advising Center, the departments of Anthropology; History; Modern Languages and Literatures; and Psychology.

The Multidisciplinary Studies Building houses the Department of Political Science and Geography and the Department of Sociology.

Located in the Arts Building are the Department of Art and Art History, the Department of Music, and the office of the Arts Advisor. The Recital Hall and Art Gallery are also in this facility.

Located in the Main Building are the Department of Communication and the Department of English, Classics, and Philosophy.

The College of Liberal and Fine Arts (COLFA) comprises 11 departments in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences: Anthropology; Art and Art History; Communication; English; History; Modern Languages; Music; Philosophy and Classics; Political Science and Geography; Psychology; Sociology.

COLFA is a highly diverse and complex organization. The disciplines are often vastly different from one another and run the gamut from those approaching the hard sciences, with federal and state research funding and research labs, such as psychology, sociology, and anthropology, to literature and the arts. The two arts departments, art and music, are themselves very complex, with continuous public programming, galleries and theatres, light industrial facilities for creative production, intensive (and expensive) student recruiting, and they function at the level of schools.

COLFA is a central component of the academic mission.  It offers 20 undergraduate and 12 graduate degrees, including 2 PhDs.  This college produces one-third of all UTSA semester credit hours.  It supplies the majority of courses in the Core Curriculum as well as state-mandated courses in History and Political Science.  Virtually every UTSA graduate takes one or more COLFA courses.  In addition, and contrary to impressions that the liberal arts are not appreciated as an avenue to employment and fulfillment, COLFA has over 6,000 undergraduate majors in its disciplines served by 166 tenure-track faculty and approximately 200 non-tenure-track faculty, and is therefore the largest UTSA college.

The COLFA faculty handles a great share of university administration and governance, providing the Chair of the Faculty Senate, Chair of the Graduate Council, Dean of the Graduate School, Assistant Dean of the College of Science, Assistant Dean of the Honors College, Vice Provost for Academic and Faculty Support, Chair of the new geology department, Director of the Teaching and Learning Center, Director of the Mexico Center, Director of the Women’s Studies Center, and more.

The COLFA faculty is truly excellent and improving all the time.  It contains three Ashbel Smith professors, numerous Piper and Chancellor’s Council and Fulbright awardees, researchers funded by the National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, National Endowment for the Humanities, Ford Foundation, National Geographic Society, and so forth.  Last year one faculty member won Germany’s highest academic honor as a Humboldt Scholar, and this year another received the Balakian Award from the National Book Critics’ Circle, the Pulitzer for literary criticism.  These are just two of many possible indications of the high quality of academic contribution and public outreach offered by the college.

COLFA has a vigorous development arm, with a 30-member advisory council.  The College Office raises roughly between $.5 and $1 million annually in gifts to the College.  This year the College Office alone (excluding departments such as Music) awarded over $83,000 in scholarships.  External research funding levels are good and growing. The Center for Archaeological Research is the main university-affiliated contract archeology firm in the state, with $1.5 million in contract funding annually.

COLFA is well-poised to help UTSA meet its new strategic goals.  Take globalization.  Our ten-member anthropology faculty has 2 individuals conducting research in Mexico, and one each in Belize, Brazil, Bolivia, Thailand, Tanzania, Papua New Guinea (and Oklahoma and Texas).  Or, take community engagement.  COLFA programs reach an audience of over 70,000 South Texans annually.  Or student research opportunities: one hundred and seventy-nine students participated in the COLFA Spring Research Conference, and many gave papers at national conferences.  Regarding graduate education, COLFA has continually shifted the proportion of instruction toward graduate students, and has increased its graduate semester credit hour production by 38% overall in the past five years, even while meeting enormous demand for undergraduate instruction.