"where students may obtain a liberal education in the arts and sciences"
Identity
The Augustana Faculty of the University of Alberta provides an outstanding undergraduate liberal arts and sciences education. Settlers founded the campus in 1911 on Treaty 6 land at asiniskaw sipisis (Stoney Creek), a traditional meeting ground for many Indigenous peoples. Today, as a Faculty of the University of Alberta, Augustana welcomes students from all walks of life to participate in a learning experience that blends theory with practice and encourages active engagement with each other and our environments. We prepare and educate students for life.
Mission
We are committed to providing a unique undergraduate education through a project-based core and a variety of multidisciplinary majors and professional programs. Our programs are delivered by a diverse community of scholars who challenge and support students to engage creatively and critically in their studies for the public good. We aspire to cultivate problem solvers who ask difficult and important questions and pose innovative solutions for the classroom, for our communities, and for the world.
“providing for their young people an education that would fit them for living, not merely to make a living”
History
Established in 1910 by Norwegian settlers, under the name Camrose Lutheran College, Augustana is still inspired by convictions that are part of its pioneer legacy: that personal wholeness emerges from a liberal education, that the proper end of leadership is service to others, and that the spirit of cooperation so crucial to rural life invigorates human endeavor.
As a Faculty of the University of Alberta, Augustana continues to build on its reputation for high-quality teaching in a friendly, caring, residence-based setting. In doing so, it provides a distinctive small-campus undergraduate experience within one of Canada's leading universities. Augustana remains mindful of its heritage, open to a diversity of perspectives and backgrounds, and responsive to the rural region in which it is located.
Augustana Faculty is characterized by a lively, collegial academic culture of research, creativity, and public engagement in which students are invited to participate. It values interdisciplinary inquiry, teaching, and learning. Augustana offers the opportunity of a memorable, life-changing education through small classes, personal attention from professors, a challenging, innovative curriculum founded on the liberal arts and sciences, experiential learning in wilderness and international environments, and a range of campus-life programs. In this academic community, students are more than narrow specialists, spectators, or strangers.
Augustana aspires to educate the whole person in an intimate, small-campus setting so that students and mentors alike are capable of engaging life with intellectual confidence and imaginative insight, equipped for leadership and service, and committed to the betterment of their world.
Read more about the origins of Augustana in How Augustana Began, by John Johansen PhD.