The College of Communication and Fine Arts is focused ultimately upon visual and audible symbols, whose rational and emotional values it is the mission of the college to create and explore. In the belief that perception is largely shaped by experience, The College of Communication and Fine Arts offers a range of symbolically rendered experiences, both individual and collective, in the hope of broadening and sensitizing the perceptions of its students.

The kind of symbolic experience that communicates emerges when, in Ruskin's phrase, "the hand, the head and the heart of man go together." Students in The College of Communication and Fine Arts receive individual and small group instruction toward this end. In the hope of furthering the capacity to impose a pattern on experience and to recognize the patterns offered by others, students of the college are exposed additionally to courses drawn from a broad base of the liberal arts.

The faculty of the college represents a diversity of academic and artistic backgrounds and interests, reflected not only in its teaching, but also in research and creative activities. It is a faculty united in the attempt to maintain the highest standards in both classroom and studio work, standards that find their limits at last only in the mystery and wonder of the human experience from which they rise.