About Western Washington University

Fairhaven College of Interdisciplinary Studies at Western Washington University cultivates student responsibility for designing and assessing learning through interdisciplinary inquiry, creativity, and scholarship. With an emphasis on justice, social and environmental responsibility and cultural diversity, we challenge ourselves through active, innovative, and experiential learning to examine our choices, roles, and purposes in the world.

Fairhaven College is the interdisciplinary, liberal arts college of Western Washington University. We are a small learning community where students take an uncommon degree of responsibility for the direction of their own education. Fairhaven students can design their own degrees by drawing from the resources at Fairhaven College and the larger university.

Fairhaven College is distinguished by:

• Small, seminar-style courses at a public university
• Narrative evaluations instead of grades
• Close advising relationships with faculty
• Opportunities for independent and international study
• Student-designed interdisciplinary degrees

Western is an energized campus community with nearly 16,000 students and over 160 academic programs. Western offers the focus on students and the faculty access of a smaller college with the academic choice, opportunities for research, multicultural diversity, and room to grow of a large university. Not so big that you feel like a number; not so small that you have to conform to a mold. Large enough for you to define yourself and small enough that you make a difference.