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Chair:
Richard Brodhead
Dean of Yale College
A. Bartlett Giamatti Professor of English
Professor of American Studies
STANDARD 1: MISSION AND PURPOSES
Higher education should aim at intellectual
culture and training rather than at the acquisition
of knowledge, and it should respect remote rather
than immediate results.
—Noah Porter, President of Yale, 1871-1886
A seminary for the Education of the Youth in the
Latin and Greek tongues or Classics only, is but a
Grammar School; when furnished with an ample
Library and philosophical apparatus, together
with tuition in Logic, Geography, Philosophy,
Astronomy, Ethics and the rest of their Liberal
Arts and Sciences, it becomes a College: when in
Addition to the Languages and liberal arts,
provision is made for a Studium Generale, and it
exhibits instruction in the highest literature,
especially in the three learned Professions of
Divinity, Law, and Physic, it rises into a
University.
—Ezra Stiles, President of Yale, 1778-1795
Yale College
Yale College
College Mission
Graduate/Professional
Education as Intellectual Training
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In 1701, Yale College was founded as a place “wherein Youth may be instructed
in the Arts and Sciences [and] through the blessing of Almighty God may be
fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.” Although the
University has evolved in the ensuing 300 hundred years, and the thrust of its
mission has changed and developed, there are aspects of this originating
statement that have been a continuing theme.
The first is an emphasis on instruction in the liberal arts. The second is the
emphasis on instruction in the liberal arts for service to the larger society.
Whereas the religious reasons that formed the basis for the beginnings of Yale
are no longer apposite, the emphasis on instruction for service has remained.
As President Charles Seymour affirmed in 1949, nearly 250 years after the
College’s founding, “The central aspect of Yale’s educational mission cannot be
too emphasized: that is, the training of youth for citizenship, for service, no
matter what their calling, in fostering the welfare of the community and nation.
Towards such a purpose every activity must be pointed.”
The definition of the College’s mission, and the curriculum to support this
mission, have evolved over time. Throughout three centuries, however, the
seminal documents about Yale education emphasize intellectual training over
course of study. The Yale Report of 1828—said to be the most influential
educational document ever to emanate from Yale—declares that “the two great
points to be gained in intellectual culture are the discipline and the furniture of
the mind: expanding its powers, and storing it with knowledge.“ Of the two
points, the report places the emphasis on the former. “No one feature in a system
of intellectual education is of greater moment,” the report continues, than such an
arrangement of duties and motives as will most effectually throw the student
upon the resources of his own mind. Without this, the whole apparatus of
libraries, and instruments, and specimens, and lectures, and teachers will be
insufficient.”
More than a century later, long after the storms of the curriculum and elective
wars in the later nineteenth century, and after two world wars, A. Whitney
Griswold, Yale’s president from 1950-1960 reinforced this ancient article of
faith.
The purpose of the liberal arts is not to teach businessmen business, or
grammarians grammar, or college students Greek and Latin. . . It is to awaken
and develop the intellectual and spiritual powers in the individual before he
enters upon his chosen career, so that he may bring to that career the greatest
possible assets of intelligence, resourcefulness, judgment and character.
Again in the present decade, President Richard C. Levin, in many of his
addresses, has enunciated these themes for a new generation. In his 1994
Baccalaureate, he reminded students that “though discussion of what it means to
be an educated person usually focuses on the content of one’s course of study,
the essence of a liberal education is to develop the freedom to think critically and
independently, to cultivate one’s mind to its fullest potential.” And in his 1998
Baccalaureate he recalled students to the University’s mission when he exhorted
them “to contribute to the shaping of the larger society and to preserve for others
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the opportunities that it has made available to you.”
Education through Active Engagement
There was another tacit understanding that grew up with the College and reached
its pinnacle in the early decades of the twentieth century. Yale became known, as
the late Yale historian George Pierson noted, as much for its “extracurriculum”
as its “curriculum.” Participation in activities beyond the classroom—in
athletics, the arts, service to school and, somewhat later, in community service—
were deemed valuable in themselves, and in cultivating the development of what
was then called “the whole man.” Indeed the emphasis on the “extracurriculum”
has been a tension in the development of the College, with the students and
alumni of the institution more focused on the balance of its benefits than the
faculty, but with all acknowledging its part in preparing students for citizenship
in the larger world.
Education as Formation of Character
In fact, implicit in all the definitions of mission, from 1701 onwards, is the idea
that education is more than the acquisition of knowledge. In the largest sense the
word implies the development of a quality of mind and spirit that transcend the
acquisition or creation of knowledge per se. A true education—a “leading out” in
the classical sense of the word—should prepare individuals to learn in new ways;
to adapt to change; to think through unfamiliar problems; and, in the words of
the Yale Study group of 1971, to develop “a central core of values, beliefs,
strategies, and information that is integrated and coherent enough to enable them
to lead productive and fulfilling lives.” The idea is that a liberally educated
person, by virtue of that education, will be better fit for even the most
professional callings, and better prepared to serve the larger society, since
“wisdom, balance vision and humanity will animate their authority, judgment
and services.”
Today, in 1999, as the College stands on the threshold of its fourth century,
the dean of Yale College and his senior staff have created the following
statement to represent its present mission.
Mission Statement for Yale College
Yale College
College Mission
Graduate/Professional
Schools
Yale University
University Mission
S1 Committee
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The mission of Yale College is to seek exceptionally promising students of all
backgrounds from across the nation and around the world and to educate them,
through mental discipline and social experience, to develop their intellectual,
moral, civic and creative capacities to the fullest. The aim of this education is the
cultivation of citizens with a rich awareness of our human heritage to lead and
serve in every sphere of human activity.
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s1 Academic Requisites
To these ends, the College emphasizes the training of the discipline of the mind,
the enlargement of knowledge, and the cultivation of sympathy of spirit through
its curriculum, its special form of residential life, and its extracurricular
opportunities.
In its curriculum, as the Yale College Program of Studies declares, the College
enforces training in the discipline of the mind by requiring both distribution and
concentration in studies. It requires of its students “a balance of breadth and
depth” so that its “courses bear such a relationship to one another that they both
broaden understanding in several areas and deepen it in one or two.”
It also requires its students to distribute their courses in four groups,
representing four different areas of intellectual endeavor, in order to expose them
to a range of kinds of thinking and appreciation. It requires them to choose a
major for concentration, in order to give them, in a preliminary way, the
experience of persevering until they command a subject matter in depth. And it
requires them to show competence in a foreign language, in order to demonstrate
how the difference of linguistic formulation provides a fresh way of viewing the
world.
In order to accomplish its goals, Yale works assiduously to engage faculty
members who are pre-eminent in their fields and yet dedicated to undergraduate
teaching. Yale’s long tradition as a school where teaching is important, valued,
and taken with utmost seriousness helps us in this aspiration, since it attracts
those who understand this about its cultural climate. All members of the Faculty
of Arts and Sciences teach, and virtually all of them teach undergraduates. The
University has pledged itself to sustaining this practice.
The Training of the Whole Person
Whatever else a Yale College education is, the academic enterprise is at the core
of it. But the College’s firm belief is that while a Yale education must include the
development of the intellect, it should not be limited to that goal.
In its dedicated support of its residential college system, the College attempts
the training of active and energetic citizens who are accustomed to living with
those different from themselves in race, nationality, upbringing, and belief. In the
colleges students form loyalties and friendships, with adults as well as peers,
based on distinctive traditions and activities. They learn to live with those
different from themselves, to appreciate their gifts, and to tolerate their flaws.
They are forced, by proximity, to develop their social and civic skills. They are
sometimes required to make judgments in community conflicts. And they are
offered opportunities—in intramural sports, drama, music and service—to test
themselves in areas in which their skills may be modest or their time
commitment limited.
In the wider College, there is a plethora of formal and informal activities in
the arts, athletics and community service, sponsored by the College or initiated
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by students themselves, which provide an extracurriculum of unusual breadth
and depth. The tension between the curriculum and extracurriculum is therefore
not one which the College avoids to seeks or alleviate, but one which it actually
fosters, in the belief that this tension itself is enriching in training an engaged and
accomplished citizenry.
Appraisal and Projection
Yale College has always considered that its mission and purposes are well
expressed in the first pages of the Yale College Programs of Study (available in
the Workroom), reviewed annually by the dean of undergraduate education.
These pages articulate the College’s philosophy of education and its commitment
to a special kind of residential life as a part of this education.
In order to respond to the occasional need for a briefer statement of its
mission and purposes, a succinct Yale College mission statement was developed
this year. The associate and assistant deans of Yale College, and the residential
college deans, have discussed and endorsed the statement, as has the Steering
Committee of the Yale College Faculty and the Reaccreditation Steering
Committee and Chairs. Some of the discussions about the mission statement
were lively and led to substantive deliberations about the mission of the College.
The dean intends that the statement will be reviewed every five years to engage
the community and ensure that the statement sufficiently embodies the College’s
main goals.
Yale College plans to place this shorter mission statement on the Yale
Reaccreditation Web Site (www.yale.edu/accred) in the fall of 1999, and to
immediately include it in its Admissions Viewbook, its Summer Programs
Catalog, and in such other of its publications as is deemed appropriate. The
College plans to preserve the front pages of the Yale College Programs of Study
in their present form.
Yale Graduate and Professional Schools
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Graduate/Professional
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In his short history of Yale, George Pierson recalls that as early as 1732 Bishop
Berkeley had donated his farm in Rhode Island to provide support for “a few
‘Scholars of the House’ residing in the College between their first and second
degrees.” During the eighteenth and most of the nineteenth centuries, Yale was at
the forefront of the development of higher learning and of the kind of liberal arts
university we know today. A revisionary movement under President Noah Porter
reasserted the centrality of Yale College and temporarily set the University back.
In 1892, however, graduate instruction was at last formally recognized and
reorganized with its own dean.
It was Ezra Stiles who, as president in 1777, actually drew up a visionary
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“Plan of a University,” proposing the addition of four professorships for the
teaching of the professions, leading the way to the inception of the Medical
Institution (1813), the Theological Department (1822), and the Law School
(1824). Today, in addition to the descendants of these schools, Yale has a Music
School (1894), a School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (1900), a
Nursing School (1923), a Drama School (set up in 1925 and given its
independence as self-governing in 1955), an Art School (1865, first as the School
of Fine Arts), an Architecture School (1972), and a School of Management
(1974). All of these schools are supported by the extensive resources of
laboratories, galleries, libraries and museums, and by a broad range of scholarly
research and teaching, carried out in component and affiliated organizations,
such as the Institution for Social and Policy Studies, the Yale Center for
International and Area Studies, the Economic Growth Center, and many others.
Faculty members from nearly all the professional schools participate in the
teaching of Yale undergraduates. Yale takes particular pride in the fact that Yale
College and its graduate and professional schools perceive themselves not simply
as individual units but as connected parts of a whole. As such, they help create a
special kind of atmosphere for education, one where interdisciplinary thinking is
encouraged to flourish, and where the interaction between individual units makes
the whole University more than the sum of its parts.
Statements of Objectives for Yale Graduate and Professional Schools
Architecture
Architectural design as a comprehensive creative process is the focus of the Yale
School of Architecture. The objectives of the School of Architecture reflect the
view that architecture is an intellectual discipline, both as an art and as a
profession. The program, therefore, is based on the following intentions: (1) to
stimulate artistic sensitivity and creative powers, (2) to strengthen intellectual
growth and the capacity to develop creative and responsible solutions to unique
and changing problems and, (3) to help the student acquire the individual
capabilities necessary for competent practice of architecture and lifelong
learning.
Art
The mission of the Yale University School of Art is to teach studio art within the
context of a liberal arts university. The School has a long and distinguished
history of educating artists at the highest level. The full time faculty of the
School work in conjunction with a broad cross section of visiting artists to
produce a wide range of educational programs.
The School of Art is founded on the belief that art is a fundamental force in
culture, and that the caliber of any nation's artists provides a measure of the
society itself. The Yale University School of Art teaches at the graduate and
undergraduate level, and consequently the student body consists of those whose
full attention is devoted to art as well as those for whom art is studied as part of a
liberal education. The School currently offers degrees and undergraduate majors
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in the areas of Graphic Design, Painting, Photography, Printmaking and
Sculpture.
Divinity
Yale Divinity School has an enduring commitment to foster the knowledge and
love of God through critical engagement with the traditions of the Christian
churches in the context of the contemporary world. It furnishes resources for the
churches to reflect critically on their identity and mission in response to changing
social and cultural realities and other churches of the world. It offers a university
setting for the scholarly assessment of the religious features of human existence.
Ecumenical and University- based, the School recognizes as indispensable to its
mission a communal environment which combines rigorous scholarly inquiry,
public worship and spiritual nurture, practical involvement with the churches’
ministries, and mutual regard among human beings across the diversities of
gender, sexual orientation, race, class, nationality, and culture.
Drama
The goal of the Yale School of Drama is to develop the skills, crafts, and
attitudes of its students to prepare them for careers in the professional theater, in
particular for the demands of repertory and ensemble productions in theater
companies throughout the United States. Although many graduates are
successful in other forms of the entertainment industry or are qualified to teach at
the university level, the primary focus of the school is training for the
professional theater. The Yale School of Drama and the Yale Repertory Theater
together strive to push forward the boundaries of artistic expression in an effort
to guarantee the present life and legacy of a dynamic and diverse American
theater.
Forestry and Environmental Studies
The mission of the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is to provide
leadership, through education and research, in the management of natural
resource systems and in the solution of environmental problems. Through its
focus on educational programs, the School develops leaders for major
institutions concerned with the earth’s environment. Through its research
activities, the School fosters study in selected areas of particular importance for
resource and environmental management.
Graduate School of Arts and Sciences
The mission of the Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences is to seek students
of the highest intellectual promise and achievement of all backgrounds, from
across the nation and around the world, and to educate them to be scholars,
teachers, and leaders for many sectors of society. The larger aim of this
enterprise is to prepare and stimulate each new generation to perpetuate and
advance human knowledge and to contribute to the health and development of
the human community.
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Law
The primary educational purpose of Yale Law School is to train lawyers and
leaders in the public and private sectors. Its primary scholarly role is to
encourage research in law. Throughout much of the School’s history, its
teachers, students, and deans have taken a broad view of law and lawyers in
society. The School has sought to train lawyers for public service and teaching as
well as for private practice, to advance inquiries at the boundaries of the law as
well as to inculcate knowledge at the core. The professional orientation is
enriched by a setting hospitable to a wide variety of intellectual currents and
designed to produce lawyers who are creative, sensitive, and open to new ideas.
Management
The mission of the Yale School of Management is to educate global leaders for
business and society. It seeks exceptional men and women who wish to develop
a deep appreciation for the uses and effects of management practice, not only for
the specific organizations in which they will work, but also in the larger social,
political, and global economic contexts. The goal of the School is to immerse
students in an environment that stresses teamwork and facilitates interaction with
a distinguished faculty. Students are actively encouraged to take part in the
broader intellectual life of the Yale community through coursework, lectures and
other extracurricular activities.
Medicine
The educational objective of the School of Medicine is to develop physicians
who are highly competent and compassionate practitioners of the medical arts,
schooled in the current knowledge of both medical biology and patient care. The
aim is to produce physicians who will be among the leaders in their chosen field,
whether in the basic medical sciences, academic clinical medicine, or medical
practice in the community.
Through innovative research, policy analysis, and education that draws upon
multidisciplinary scholarship from across the graduate and professional
programs, Epidemiology and Public Health at Yale provides leadership to protect
and improve the health of the public, and to serve local, national, and
international communities with knowledge and expertise.
Music
The Yale School of Music is a graduate and professional school for men and
women of exceptional ability, who, by reason of their musical aptitudes and their
general intellectual background are qualified to do graduate work at this
University. In addition to receiving professional career training, students are
encouraged to participate in the rich intellectual life of the entire University and
to develop additional resources as human beings.
Nursing
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The ultimate mission of the School of Nursing is to contribute to better health
care for people. Through the systematic study of the nature and effect of nursing
practice, students are prepared to become effective nurse clinicians and nurse
scholars capable of improving practice through sound clinical judgment,
scholarship, and research.
Appraisal and Projection
All Schools of the University now have mission statements or statements of
objectives regularly reviewed by their Executive Committees or other
comparable faculty bodies, and published in their catalogs.
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In preparation for Yale’s fourth century, the Yale Corporation in 1992 endorsed
a mission statement for the University as a whole and elaborated on its long-term
objectives.
Mission Statement for Yale University
As one of the world’s leading centers for learning, Yale’s primary mission is to
attract, educate and motivate a diverse group of the most highly talented men and
women in order to advance and disseminate knowledge and to promote the
scholarship, high character, values, and leadership which can be directed towards
sustaining and improving society.
Intrinsic to this mission are the faculty’s dual responsibilities for outstanding
teaching and original research, carried out in a community comprised of Yale
College, a Graduate School with broad coverage of the arts and sciences, and an
array of professional schools in arts, sciences, and learned professions. This
mission requires a continuing commitment to the excellence, the competitive
position and the reputation for academic leadership that Yale has earned over
nearly three centuries.
The coming decades present a host of challenges and opportunities for Yale
as it pursues the following key objectives:
Ensure the enduring qualities of a Yale education by focusing resources on
core programs and facilities with emphasis on the arts and sciences at both
the undergraduate and graduate levels, achieving excellence by building on
quality, eliminating those programs and activities that cannot achieve the
high standard which Yale requires.
Provide continuous opportunity for innovation and improvement in those
programs which enhance Yale’s role as an international center of learning.
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Preserve access to a Yale education based on each individual’s character,
talent, and potential, without regard to financial circumstances.
Attract faculty and students who combine a record of intellectual
achievement with energy, creativity, and the capacity to become leaders in
society.
Enable students to experience a broad array of outstanding extracurricular
activities that support and supplement Yale’s academic programs.
Maintain a balanced operating budget over time, even as the University
seizes new opportunities to enlarge knowledge and improve educational
programs.
Invest sufficiently in Yale’s physical plant to ensure its long-term integrity
and its ongoing ability to embrace the research, teaching, residential,
athletic, and support requirements of the University.
Balance Yale’s immediate requirements with its long-term ability to
provide the resources necessary to maintain the excellence of its student
body, the faculty, and the academic programs by responsibly managing the
endowment and by exploring new methods of generating revenue
consistent with the institution’s academic mission.
Appraisal and Projection
The University’s mission statement, created in 1991, will be reviewed by the
Institutional Policy Committee of the Yale Corporation in 2001, and every ten
years after that date, in order to ensure its accuracy and completeness in a
changing University climate.
LINKS TO STANDARDS:
| S1 | S2 | S3 | S4 | S5 | S6 | S7 | S8 | S9 | S10 | S11 |
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RESPONSE FORM FOR STANDARD 1
Yale College
College Mission
Graduate/Professional
Schools
Yale University
University Mission
We would appreciate your assistance to the Yale Reaccreditation Committee by filling out
this response form.
We would enjoy knowing who you are, and may wish to contact you for further dialog on
your observations. However, this information is NOT REQUIRED.
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If you would prefer to respond via US POST OFFICE Mail, the committee would be most
grateful to receive your comments. Please send them to
Patricia Klindienst
Office of the President
149 Elm Street
New Haven, CT 06520-9998
USA
Please indicate which of these pages you are specifically responding to, and understand
that a copy of your comments will be sent to the Chair/CoChairs of the Committees on
whose pages you are commenting.
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© Copyright Trustees of Yale University.
This page was created by PK on 05/20/1999; last modified on 11/03/1999.
Please send comments to [email protected].
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