How Governments Could Influence AI
Whenever you ask AI a question, what comes back isn't always neutral. In some cases, the information that guides an AI response could be manipulated. As more people look to AI for quick answers, new research from College of Arts and Sciences sociologist Hannah Waight suggests you could get a different response depending on which language you use.
“People often talk about AI as if it learns from the internet in some neutral way,” Waight said. “It doesn’t. It learns from information environments that have already been shaped by institutions and power, and those environments can leave measurable traces in what models say."
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What’s Happening in CAS?
CAS Connection is on hiatus. Look for the next issue, which will arrive in email inboxes and here, on Sept. 16.
Keep up-to-date on what's been going on in the college this past year. From malaria research and returning looted artifacts to commencement and the role of storytelling in a liberal arts education, our faculty, students and alumni are doing big things.
Undergraduate Studies
Small classes. Big ideas. More than half of the University of Oregon’s student population is pursuing a College of Arts and Sciences degree. But what you’ll find at CAS is an intimate liberal arts experience at an R1 institution. With a median class size of 23 students per classroom, CAS is an environment where you can work closely with faculty dedicated to research and mentorship. With more than 50 departments and programs, we have a program where you can transform curiosity into action.
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You’ve got ambition, and you’re ready for the next step: graduate school. Whether your goals are to expand scholarly knowledge or level up your professional capacities, CAS has more than 30 master’s programs and more than 20 doctoral programs, all span a range of disciplines. Our faculty members are here to support you on your academic journey, to guide you through research and advance your professional skills.
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Our faculty go beyond the frontiers of science. Whether it’s green technology of tomorrow or tackling centuries-old philosophical questions, our College of Arts and Sciences faculty are in forward motion to tomorrow.
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Meet our Dean
In the College of Arts and Sciences (CAS), we are committed to excellence in research and teaching, student success, and diversity, equity, and belonging.
A liberal arts education—one that offers a breadth of intellectual approaches and perspectives and depth in a major discipline—is the foundation to a purposeful life as a life-long learner, engaged citizen, and leader. The skills you will learn here—from written and verbal communication to analytical and quantitative reasoning, to compassion and understanding—are those that employers seek and will open the door to a wealth of opportunities.
You will find more than 50 majors and a multitude of minors within CAS, and seemingly endless opportunities for personal exploration and discovery. Whether you are an incoming first-year student, a grad student or a transfer student, you can map an exciting future and be part of a fun, warm, engaged liberal arts community here. Come join us. And go Ducks!
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Happening at CAS
Department of History Fall Get-Together
3:00 p.m.Sep
29
3:00–6:00 p.m.
The history department welcomes our students back to campus with a casual get-together! Join us for free pizza and beverages; learn what’s happening in the department this year; and connect with the history community.
Free and open to all history undergraduates, graduates, faculty, and staff!
20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture: "The Vanishing Indian Property Rights: How Federal Courts are Stripping Indians of the Rights to Their Own Lands" Featuring Bryan Newland
noonSep
30
noon
The University of Oregon's Environmental and Natural Resources Law (ENR) Center and cross-campus partners will present the 20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture—featuring Bryan Newland (Ojibwe), former US Assistant Secretary of the Interior for Indian Affairs—via Zoom Webinar. Register for the webinar through Zoom or on our event page.
Newland will present his virtual talk, "The Vanishing Indian Property Rights: How Federal Courts are Stripping Indians of the Rights to Their Own Lands."
Bryan Newland is a citizen of the Bay Mills Indian Community, where he served as Tribal President from 2017 to 2021 and Chief Judge from 2013 to 2017. From 2021 to 2025, he served as Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs in the US Department of the Interior, where he led the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Bureau of Indian Education, and Bureau of Trust Funds Administration. As Assistant Secretary, Newland helped coordinate a historic $45B investment in Indian Country; led the development of a co-stewardship policy to promote public-land management agreements between federal agencies and Tribal Nations; and worked to implement the Federal Indian Boarding School Initiative, a comprehensive effort to recognize the troubled legacy of federal Indian boarding school policies and to address these policies' intergenerational impact. Today, Newland is a principal attorney at Powers, Pyles, Sutter & Verville, PC, where he represents Tribal governments, Tribal business entities, and inter-Tribal organizations on a broad range of legal and policy matters. Newland received a JD from Michigan State University (MSU) College of Law, where he also earned an Indian Law Certificate, and a BA from James Madison College at MSU. He is a recipient of the National American Indian Court Judges Association's Judicial Excellence Award (2024) and the Clean Water Action Great Lakes Protectors Award (2020).
Through its Native Environmental Sovereignty Project, the ENR Center established the Rennard Strickland Lecture series in 2006 to honor the legacy of former Oregon Law Professor and Dean Rennard Strickland, who retired that year and passed in 2021. An Osage citizen of the Cherokee Nation, Strickland contributed mightily to the field of Indian Law, the practice of legal education, and Oregon Law's ENR and Indian Law programs throughout his lifetime. In keeping with his assertion that "[i]f there is to be a post-Columbian future—a future for any of us—it will be an Indian future..." (Tonto's Revenge, 1997), the Rennard Strickland Lecture series has a thematic focus on Indigenous environmental-legal leadership and Tribal sovereignty in the twenty-first century.
The 20th Annual Rennard Strickland Lecture is co-sponsored by the UO Department of Native American and Indigenous Studies, Oregon Law's Native American Law Students Association, and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.
Oregon CLE credit pending.
HIST and IRES Welcome Back Barbecue
4:30 p.m.Oct
1
4:30–7:00 p.m.
History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies invites our graduate students, faculty, and staff to a welcome back barbecue!
Spend an evening with History and Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies. Talk with old friends, meet new colleagues, and enjoy fine food and drinks.
All HIST and IRES graduate students, faculty, and staff are invited. Families warmly welcomed.
We Hold These Truths: 250 Years of the American Experiment at Home and Abroad
6:00 p.m.Oct
6
6:00–7:30 p.m.
As the United States marks the 250th anniversary of its founding, this symposium returns to the bold universal promise of 1776—the claim that “all men are created equal” and endowed with “unalienable rights.” Cast at once as the rights of citizens of a new republic and as the rights of all of humankind, they also coexisted with a deep contradiction: the subjugation of Native Americans, enslaved people, and women. The principles at the heart of the U.S. founding launched a politics of rights whose origins and reverberations were transnational, even as access to them remained sharply unequal in practice.
“We Hold These Truths: 250 Years of the American Experiment at Home and Abroad” brings together a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and leading scholars of citizenship, political development, race, gender, immigration, and civil rights to reflect on this legacy. The panel will explore how America’s founding ideals have shaped struggles for inclusion at home and abroad, and how those ideals have been stretched, reinterpreted, and at times betrayed across two and a half centuries.
Refreshments will be available at 5:45pm.
Panelists:
Nick Kristof - New York Times
Megan Ming Francis - University of Washington
Peter Spiro - Temple University
Carol Nackenoff - Swarthmore University
Moderator:
Dan Tichenor - UO Knight Chair; Co-Director, Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics
Presented by the Schnitzer School of Global Studies and Languages and the Wayne Morse Center for Law and Politics.
Free and open to the public. No registration required.
This event will be livestreamed and recorded. Join online