Faculty (meaning)

In British educational institutions, a faculty tends to be a department or a group of related departments. For example, in a given school or college, the Science Faculty may contain Departments of Chemistry, Physics and Biology. Such groupings are often formed for convenience, and because the subjects are related by method, or by areas of interest. More traditionally, the older universities in the UK had faculties to teach the main subjects through which they prepared students to enter the learned professions: Divinity (more usually called Theology nowadays), Medicine and Law. There was also a Faculty of Arts, which taught the basic university curriculum. This had to be studied successfully before a student could proceed to the higher faculties. The Arts were known as the liberal arts, of which there were seven, divided into two groups. The trivium (Latin for 'three ways') contained three subjects, grammar, rhetoric, and logic (or dialectic). The quadrivium ('four ways') contained four: arithmetic, music, geometry and astronomy. Nowadays there is much variation in what a Faculty of Arts contains; and the same is true of Faculties of Humanities. In general, there have been great changes in the curriculum at universities, and the range of subjects taught would have been hard, if not impossible, for a mediaeval scholar to imagine.

In the USA, the word faculty is used to mean what in Britain is usually called the 'academic staff': the full range of those who teach students, professors, lecturers and so on, along with those of similar standing whose duties lie mostly in research. You may risk misunderstandings if you talk about 'the faculty' in this American sense while working in British universities, where 'the faculty' is likely to be understood as meaning the administrative grouping in which you are working.