UNC Asheville's Integrative Liberal Studies Program received top honors recently from the Association of General and Liberal Studies, a national forum addressing the improvement of undergraduate education. The 2007 Award for Improving General Education was accepted on behalf of the university by Edward Katz, UNC Asheville dean of University Programs and professor of literature and language, who led the intensive faculty effort to create the program.

The Integrative Liberal Studies (ILS) Program, now in its fourth year, provides students a new approach to general education courses, which are courses required outside of a student's major. The award recognizes the University's approach to program development and implementation as well as the program's innovative features.

Students start the ILS Program with an introductory colloquium and build their knowledge through courses clustered around national and world issues. Current cluster topics include The Science and Politics of Human Health and Illness, Globalization and Environmental Issues, and Transformations in Appalachia: The Intersections of Science and Culture. Each cluster offers courses from a number of different disciplines, such as sociology, biology and political science. Through the cluster approach, students learn how expertise from several subject areas is essential in understanding complex, real-world problems.

The ILS Program also includes a sequence of three interdisciplinary courses in the Humanities, a course in the arts, and a set of courses in writing, information literacy, diversity, and quantitative reasoning.