Dean's Message
A message from Dean Pihos
I am honored to be serving as Fairhaven’s Dean and to be a member of the College’s inspiring and inclusive community of students, staff, and faculty. Fairhaven College was created more than a half century ago as an experiment to recapture the intimate atmosphere and student-centered focus of a small liberal arts college, while leveraging the resources of a public university. Much has changed—at Fairhaven, at Western, and in the world around us. Nonetheless, Fairhaven remains true to its essence.
At Fairhaven, we take a student-centered approach to education. Our robust advising and small classes allow us to get to know students, and students to know faculty and staff. All our classes—including the Fairhaven Core, which replaces WWU’s General University Requirements—are small, discussion-based seminars, where students build the writing and thinking skills needed to analyze complex problems.
A Fairhaven education focuses on the learning process. Fairhaven students can enroll in any major on campus, but many design their own major—our Interdisciplinary Concentration. By working with faculty to put together a unique program of study, students learn to ask questions that arise from their intellectual interests and to develop their own scholarly perspective. Grading using narrative evaluations, rather than letter grades, allows faculty and students to focus on the learning process as well as learning outcomes. When Fairhaven students graduate, they may not have all the answers, but they know how to ask (and answer!) difficult questions.
We are an interdisciplinary college. The varied educational and professional backgrounds of Fairhaven faculty allow us to provide an education that crosses disciplines. Our faculty includes writers and scholars of literature; lawyers and legal scholars; audio producers and composers; musicians and musicologists; visual artists and film scholars; scientists studying birds, botany, ecology, and public health; educators and scholars of education; mental health practitioners; historians, queer theorists, and Indigenous studies scholars. Our intellectually diverse faculty allows us not only to support Interdisciplinary Concentrations and independent studies, but also to offer unique minors, including Law, Diversity & Justice; Audio Technology, Music & Society; Education & Social Justice; and Human Rights.
Fairhaven College is rooted in place, within Sehome arboretum in the ancestral homelands of the Lummi and Nooksack nations. The Outback Farm embraces agricultural practices relevant to our region, including a food forest, and numerous field-based courses in which students make sense of our surrounding world. As well, our students participate in a wide assortment of internships throughout Northwest Washington every quarter, making contributions to numerous non-profit organizations, local business, campus projects, and research studies.
Yet Fairhaven is open to the world. Our faculty teach about nearly every part of the globe. Through the World Issues Forum, Fairhaven features weekly world-class speakers during Fall and Winter quarters to address important global issues. Fairhaven faculty take students on quarter long courses abroad. We also guide students to affordable study abroad programs through WWU’s Education Abroad office. Most exceptionally, Fairhaven College offers the Adventure Learning Grant, which pay for students to spend ten months travelling and learning abroad.
In an increasingly complex society, we believe that the Fairhaven College model of face-to-face, discussion-based interdisciplinary education remains a vital and necessary approach. But it is much more than that, too—our rooted, student-centered, and inquiry-based approach to interdisciplinary education provides a model for embracing, understanding, and working to solve the pressing challenges we face.
Please explore out website and the programs we have to offer. If you need further information, please reach out to us at Fairhaven.College@wwu.edu, (360) 650-6680, or stop by the College for a tour!
Warmest regards,
Peter C. Pihos
Interim Dean, Fairhaven College