The Center for 21st Century Liberal Learning (C21) is a college-level initiative housed in the Dean's office of the University of Washington's College of Arts & Sciences. We sit outside any single department or major by design, working across the college to address a question no individual department is positioned to answer on its own: what does it actually mean to get a liberal arts education, and how do you build the identity and capabilities to carry it forward?

C21 was founded in 2011 by Kevin Mihata who joined the College of Arts & Sciences Dean's office with a question he had been carrying since his years as a departmental advisor: how do liberal arts students actually change their identity, not just acquire credentials? That question became the engine of everything C21 has built since.

What began as a shared institutional home for existing college-level programs evolved over more than a decade into a sustained experiment in liberal arts education. Through study abroad cohorts, immersive career programs, corporate partnerships, credit-bearing courses, and a podcast, C21 kept returning to the same core problem: the gap between what a liberal arts education is supposed to develop in students and what students are actually able to demonstrate when they leave. Each program was an attempt to close that gap, and each one taught us something the next program could build on.

Today, C21's work reaches students, faculty, and staff through several interconnected programs, all organized around the same underlying philosophy of mission, challenge, and story.

gesture is C21's signature student-facing initiative where the framework is most directly and intensively experienced. Through immersive workshops, simulated professional experiences, credit-bearing AI curriculum, and the UNHIREABLE podcast, gesture helps Arts & Sciences students develop the professional identity and practical capabilities they need to thrive in an AI-transformed world.

College Edge brings C21's approach to students before they've even begun their first quarter at UW, embedding our principles into the transition to college from day one. It is the redesigned evolution of the college's longstanding Early Fall Start program where incoming first-years and transfer students move onto campus early, spend three weeks in a small seminar-style class, and begin developing the professional identity and early career thinking that C21 programs build on, all before the rest of their class has even arrived.

Advising and faculty development work extends the same philosophy to the professionals who work alongside students every day, building the C21 approach into how advisors and instructors think about student growth and professional development across the college.

C21 is led by Anis Bawarshi, who serves as the Director of C21 following Kevin Mihata’s departure in 2026, and collaborates closely with Candice Rai, Associate Dean for Undergraduate Education, in advising and undergraduate experience initiatives across the College of Arts and Sciences. The current team brings together expertise in advising, curriculum design, employer engagement, content production, and AI learning, united by a shared conviction that liberal arts education, done differently, produces something genuinely distinctive.

The programs we run today look different from the ones we ran five years ago, and intentionally so. Each one has been an attempt to answer a question, to learn something about how students grow, what conditions make that possible, and how to keep pace with a world that keeps changing. That spirit of innovation and adaptation is not just our history; it's how we work. If that spirit resonates and those are the same questions you’re asking too, there’s a place for you here. Welcome to C21.