The Faculty of Arts is the largest faculty of the University of Calgary. It is also one of the university's founding faculties, along with commerce, education, engineering, graduate studies, science, and physical education. The official establishment of the current Faculty of Arts was in 2010, following the amalgamation of the four former Faculties of Communication and Culture, Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences. However, the Faculty of Arts can further trace its origins back to 1951 under the Faculty of Arts and Science, as it was originally merged with the university's natural sciences departments. This curious measure of dates makes the Faculty of Arts the second oldest faculty as well as the youngest faculty of the university simultaneously, depending on where one counts. Since then, the Faculty of Arts has expanded to become the university's most comprehensive and interdisciplinary faculty, incorporating fields from the humanities, fine arts, and social sciences.

Due to its extensive nature, the Faculty of Arts is housed in various buildings throughout the main campus. The Faculty of Arts currently has more than 7,100 undergraduate students with more than 725 graduate students. The student population is overseen by 378 academic faculty members with the aid of 132 administrative and support staff. Since 1966, the Faculty of Arts has produced 10 Canada Research Chairs, 20 fellows of the Royal Society of Canada, and well over 46,000 alumni throughout the world.

History

The Faculty of Arts can trace its history back to 1906, when the Calgary Normal School was established as a vocational school for teaching. Initially housed in Central School (later as James Short School), the school later moved in 1908 to the McDougall School to accommodate the growing student body. The school over time, began to offer introductory courses from the arts, sciences, engineering, and commerce. During this early history, the school moved several times: as an occupant of the west wing of the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art (then referred simply as Tech), to King Edward School in 1940, and back to the west wing of the Tech campus in 1945. By 1945, the school was replaced with university level courses, operating as an extension of the University of Alberta Faculty of Education. During this time, Calgary had become the largest Canadian city without a home-grown University. Calgarians were determined to change that fact and formed the University Committee as a vehicle to accelerate the effort to transform the Calgary branch into a full-fledged University. In 1948, the Committee published its first official proposal addressing the need for a "University of Southern Alberta," to the Calgary Chamber of Commerce. The name was later rejected due to its acronym, USA, as to prevent confusion with the United States of America. In 1951, the Calgary branch started to offer first-year Bachelor of Arts and Sciences programmes under the newly established Faculty of Arts and Sciences. In the same year, the Arts and Science Society (ASS) was created to address student "grievances" for the newly established Faculty. This organisation would later become the Faculty of Arts Student's Association (FASA). In 1960 the Calgary branch, known then as the University of Alberta in Calgary (UAC), had moved from the west wing of the Tech campus, to its current location near University Heights. The founding buildings of the new campus were the Arts and Education (present-day Administration) and the Science and Engineering (present-day Science A) buildings, providing instructional courses for the "soft and hard sciences" respectively.

Creation of the University of Calgary The first wave of construction conducted throughout early 1960s reignited conversations among students and citizens about the future of UAC with respect to the main campus in Edmonton. On 8 November 1963, a massive student protest dubbed "the Great Autonomy Demonstration of '63" occurred during a UAC Board of Governors' meeting, where protesters demanded autonomy for the budding UAC. The demonstration featured a headless mannequin with the words "Give UAC her head" and an engineering cog wheel with the words "Autonomy 196?." This secessionist movement would be realised in 1966, when the Universities Act was passed, which declared the University of Calgary an autonomous institution from the University of Alberta. The resulting provincial Act granted the university full academic, financial, and administrative independence. In the same year, the Calgary Hall (renamed Craigie Hall) was officially open, which gave space to the university's diverse humanities and performing arts departments. Concurrently, the university became a trustee of the Banff School of Fine Arts, previously a satellite to the University of Alberta. The Banff School would remain an affiliated body to the university's fine arts departments until 1978, when it became an autonomous institution from the university. To pay homage to its past, the university adopted the colours red and yellow – the former from the Calgary Normal School's azure, navy, and red and the latter from the University of Alberta's evergreen and gold. In 1967, the Faculty of Fine Arts was established, incorporating the departments of dance, drama, music, and visual arts. Shortly afterwards, in 1969, the Social Sciences building reached completion. The brutalist tower would become home to the university's various social science departments. The university experienced a rapid period of growth just five years into autonomy. This led the university into considering ambitious expansion plans for the main campus. According to early schematic plans in 1967, the university desired to create building complexes that represent the major clusters of the present Faculty of Arts: fine arts, humanities, and social sciences. The Humanities Complex would have comprised six buildings of seven to nine stories tall along with a tower of over 13 stories tall, all of which would have been located directly east of present-day Administration – none of these plans materialised. The Social Sciences complex would have comprised the Social Sciences Tower along with several four to seven story tall buildings surrounding present-day Administration – only the Tower was completed. Only the Fine Arts Complex was built in its entirety, however not as originally planned. Due to the unbuilt Humanities Complex, the departments of fine arts have to share their intended space with the university's language, literature, and culture departments. It would take another two decades for the visual arts to obtain their own independent space, albeit reduced from the original plan. The incomplete Social Sciences and Humanities complexes were later abandoned by the mid-1970s for unknown reasons.

Decentralised Period In 1972, the Earth Sciences building was completed, housing the departments of earth science, including anthropology, archeology, and geography. University enrolment increased from 3,740 undergraduates in 1966 to 10,864 by a mere decade later. This started to cause administrative problems and efficiency costs for the giant Faculty of Arts and Sciences. This led to the eventual breakup of the faculty in 1976, resulting into the creation of the University College and three separate faculties: the Faculty of Sciences, the Faculty of Social Sciences, and the Faculty of Humanities. In the same year, the interdisciplinary Arctic Institute of North America took up residence on the university campus. In 1981, the University College, whose duties were to register first-year students into general studies, humanities, science, and social science programmes, renamed itself into the Faculty of General Studies.

The university would later experience a second wave of growth when it was announced that Calgary (as well as the university) would host the XV Winter Olympic Games. In preparation for the Games, the university undertook several construction projects such as the Olympic Oval, the Athlete's Village (currently part of Residence), the Jack Simpson Gymnasium, and the Arts Building and Parkade which would house the university's visual arts departments. In 1994, the university played host to the Learned Societies Conference, an academic convention of scholars from the social sciences and humanities. The event witnessed about 8,000 delegates from more than 100 academic organisations, discuss and present their research from their respective fields of discipline. In 1998, following the trends of many North American universities, the university flirted with the idea of reorganising and condensing various departments and faculties as a measure to "encourage collaboration while maintaining their separate identities." If realised, this move would have led to the creation of academic strategic clusters or "super-Faculties," which would have merged fine arts, general studies, and humanities into the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, while merging education and social sciences into the Faculty of Education and Social Science. In 2000, the Faculty of General Studies renamed itself again to become the Faculty of Communications and Culture, which better reflected the faculty's teaching and research activities

Creation of the Faculty of Arts On 25 June 2009, the University Board of Governors voted to reunify the four separate faculties of Communication and Culture, Fine Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences into a single amalgam, the Faculty of Arts. The new streamlined Faculty was finalised on 1 April 2010, and was designed to conform with other Canadian research universities, most of whom "have two or fewer arts and social science-type faculties." The departments of Music, Dance, and Drama would later merge in July 2013 to form the School of Creative and Performing Arts. In the same year, plans were announced that the university would no longer offer 19 undergraduate programmes in the upcoming academic year—10 of which belonged to the Faculty of Arts. Among these suspended programmes included the History and Philosophy of Science programme – the only such programme offered in the province of Alberta. In 2014, it was announced that the departments of Greek and Roman Studies and Religion had merged into a single department of Classics and Religion. Simultaneously, the department of Archaeology and Anthropology had merged in the same year. The year of 2016 was celebrated as the university's semicentennial, marking 50 years of autonomy and academia. On 28 May to 3 June 2016, the university played host again to the 75th Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, welcoming 8,000 delegates, 70 academic organisations, and more than 5,000 research papers to be housed on the university campus. In June 2016, negotiations for the School of Languages, Linguistics, Literatures, and Cultures (SLLLC) were finalised as an effort to condense the university's humanities departments into a single collective entity. SLLLC was officially inaugurated in February 2019.

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