Mission Statement
“The mission of the University of Michigan is to serve the people of Michigan and the world through preeminence in creating, communicating, preserving and applying knowledge, art, and academic values, and in developing leaders and citizens who will challenge the present and enrich the future.”
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Despite its brevity and simplicity, the University’s mission statement reflects the University’s complexity. It mirrors, for example, the University’s key values: knowledge and art, service, good citizenship, and leadership. It also captures the University’s primary activities: research and creativity, education, and service. Why has such a large and complex institution as the University of Michigan adopted such a broad mission statement? The answer to this question lies in the University’s structure.
The University of Michigan’s reputation as a leader in higher education is rooted in its nineteen schools and colleges; its array of academic departments and programs, most of which are nationally ranked (for example, U.S. News). The University’s academic programs offer learning environments that range from general studies to mechanical engineering, from the history of art to pharmaceutical sciences, from dance to business, from human-computer interaction to graphic arts, from law to political science, from medicine to architecture, and from the environment and astronomy to musical theatre. These are but a few examples on a long list of fields and disciplines at the University.
The underlying cornerstones of the University’ scholarly reputation and its pluralist academic community are its people: the scholarly and creative contributions of the University’s accomplished faculty; the quality, vitality, and passion of its students–undergraduate, graduate, and professional; and the contributions of staff members at all levels.
However, each of the schools and colleges—and, in the larger units, each department—has a distinct academic mission and culture. Continuing a long and distinguished tradition, every academic program at the University shapes its own intellectual milieu for its faculty and students. Faculty members form the core of each of these academic environments, supported by research scientists, postdoctoral fellows, graduate students, professional students, and undergraduate students, who collectively play key roles in the knowledge and creative enterprise.
This decentralized nature of the institution is one that leads the University to provide each of these units with the infrastructure and the support they need to continue to break new ground and push on the boundaries of knowledge and creativity. This support consists of elements described in this chapter, which include setting general direction for the University; aligning the budget with University priorities; protecting the University’s fiscal strength; promoting activities that reflect the University’s values, including our long-standing commitment to diversity; ensuring institutional integrity through policies and procedures at every level; and effective problem-solving. Another noteworthy feature of this infrastructure is a strong commitment to interdisciplinarity that helps faculty and students cross disciplinary boundaries and to collaborate with others, a topic to which we will return later in this report.
A broad mission statement such as the one articulated by the University of Michigan is an umbrella for the mission and goals of our academic programs. The University’s Mission Statement respects the fact that faculty in each of the academic units are the stewards of the units’ academic mission and goals. Within the context of the University as a decentralized institution that is supported by a strong central infrastructure, Chapter Two of our report will address each component of Criterion One for re-accreditation.