University of Puget Sound is an independent predominantly residential undergraduate liberal arts college with selected graduate programs building effectively on a liberal arts foundation. The university, as a community of learning, maintains a strong commitment to teaching excellence, scholarly engagement, and fruitful student-faculty interaction.

The mission of the university is to develop in its students capacities for critical analysis, aesthetic appreciation, sound judgment, and apt expression that will sustain a lifetime of intellectual curiosity, active inquiry, and reasoned independence. A Puget Sound education, both academic and cocurricular, encourages a rich knowledge of self and others; an appreciation of commonality and difference; the full, open, and civil discussion of ideas; thoughtful moral discourse; and the integration of learning, preparing the university's graduates to meet the highest tests of democratic citizenship. Such an education seeks to liberate each person's fullest intellectual and human potential to assist in the unfolding of creative and useful lives.
Theatre Arts offers courses and creative activities in which students learn to make, understand, and evaluate theatrical events. In doing so, students acquire knowledge and skills that enable them to become collaborative, informed, imaginative, and engaged theatre makers, who - as artists, scholars, and citizens - will pursue paths after graduation in professional theatre, education, business, and other fields of endeavor. The faculty is committed to theatre as a liberal art and an emphasis on the total artist. Majors, minors, and non-majors develop skills and connect insights in acting, directing, design, production, dramaturgy, research, and writing throughout their coursework, culminating in thesis projects presented as part of Senior Theatre Festival. Through participation in student- and faculty- directed productions, students ground their study of theatre in rehearsal and performance. Department productions provide the university and local community with the opportunity to experience high-quality theatre of diverse style, content, and form from a variety of historical periods.