The overall mission of the Department of English is to engage in writing, research, teaching, and public service that advance our understanding of the field English through Creative Writing, Literature, Medieval Studies, and Rhetoric and Professional Writing.

• To provide appropriate pedagogies - including class size - and environments (classrooms, equipment, resources, and technology) that will lead o student retention and success as well as an increase in the number of majors and minors.
• To help students see themselves as professionals, as part of a discipline with skills and abilities valuable in the business, teaching, publishing, or postgraduate work.
• To give students a sense of themselves as citizens of a larger community by encouraging participation in service learning and in diverse and international course work and programming.
• To assure that students encounter creativity crucial to English studies through theater productions, readings by professional writers, and their own creative and critical production and presentation.
• To balance the needs of general education - communication, diversity, global perspectives, interdisciplinary studies - with those of the major.
• To acquire adequate funding to support the department's contributions to general education and the liberal arts through departmental budgets and hiring.
• To value faculty scholarship and service through greater support for and participation in activities of the profession

• Educate students to read critically, write clearly and imaginatively, think logically, and speak articulately about literature and language.
• Promote critical literacy, that is, the capacity to interpret, evaluate, and contextualize literary and social text
• Acquire and disseminate knowledge of our expanding literary and cultural heritages
• Teach a historical sense of language and literatures in English in all their diversity to the multicultural student body from the state.
• Lead students to realize how the expressive and analytical skills they acquire and exercise in their study of English prepares them for a wide variety of meaningful professional employment opportunities upon graduation.