2006-2007 Academic Year - Trinity University

TRINITY UNIVERSITY
STATEMENT OF INSTITUTIONAL MISSION
(Approved by the Board of Trustees, January 20, 2006)
Trinity University is an independent coeducational university whose mission is excellence in the
interrelated areas of teaching, research, and service. Trinity seeks to provide broad and intensive
educational opportunities primarily to undergraduates in liberal arts and sciences, and in selected
professional and pre-professional fields. It also offers a small number of selected high quality graduate
programs.
Trinity University is dedicated to creating a superior intellectual environment by: recruiting, developing,
and retaining outstanding faculty members dedicated to teaching, to scholarship and creative endeavor,
and to service to the University and its community; identifying, and attracting talented and highly
motivated students to its predominantly full-time, residential student body; and providing a supportive
and challenging experience wherein students, faculty, and staff can realize the potential of their abilities
and engage their responsibilities to others. Trinity respects its historic ties to the Presbyterian Church,
with which it continues to have a covenant relationship.
DIVERSITY FOR EXCELLENCE AT TRINITY – A STATEMENT OF
INTENT
(Adopted by the Board of Trustees, May 1985)
Trinity University stands committed to the attainment of excellence in liberal arts education. It affirms
that, in our pluralistic society and world, excellent education must be carried out in a pluralistic setting.
To the extent that education is carried out in a monocultural context, the quality of educational
transactions suffers, and any claim to excellence is seriously weakened. Socializing young people to be
liberally educated citizens of a democracy must take place in a context where the diversity of the
experience, points of view, interests, and contributions of their fellow citizens is fairly and unavoidably
encountered.
As it moves toward recognition as a nationally distinguished educational institution, Trinity University
recognizes that such status demands the achievement and maintenance of ethnic diversity within all of
its constituent groups, thereby reducing the prospect that the University may be unfairly stereotyped.
Trinity University is also a member of a community that is massively Hispanic in character and identity.
This not only opens unique educational opportunities for all who teach and study at Trinity, but also
places a special obligation on the University to be responsive to and to enrich the life of its larger
community. Because of its national aspirations and location in San Antonio, Trinity University has a
special responsibility to assure that minorities – Blacks and Hispanics in particular – become an integral
and significant part of its constituencies.
Trinity University, therefore, affirms that promotion of diversity and avoidance of racial, sex, class, and
ethnic exclusivity are moral imperatives. It affirms that the University’s highest goal must be to educate
men and women for moral sensitivity and responsible action in society. To achieve diversity for
excellence, Trinity University will endeavor:
1. Actively to seek the enrollment and retention of significant numbers of qualified students of
Hispanic, Black, Native American, and Asian American origin.
2. Actively to promote the financial, academic, and social conditions which will make it possible
for qualified students of all ethnic and social class backgrounds to be significant components
of, and positive contributors to, the Trinity University community.
3. Actively to seek a larger component of minorities and women in the Trinity University Faculty
and Administration.
4. Actively to promote Trinity’s openness to social and ethnic diversity, using academic
programs, lectureships, artistic endeavors, and other means to create within the University
community an awareness of the life, concerns, and contributions of all national minorities.
5. Actively to promote, by similar means, Trinity’s appreciation of the special multicultural
composition of San Antonio, and of the Hispanic culture of the region.
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