The Board of Trustees approved the college’s revised mission and values statement during its May meeting.
The approval comes after the faculty greenlit the third draft of the statement in March, marking a step towards establishing the college’s strategic plan, which is scheduled to be finalized during the fall semester.
“I am so proud of the way we all came together to iterate and contribute to an inclusive process,” college President Nicole Hurd wrote in an email. Sixteen members of the college’s faculty and staff worked on the steering committee that drafted the statement.
“And I am thrilled that the mission and values will undergird the emerging strategic plan and campus master plan,” Hurd continued.
The college’s mission and values statement had not been updated since 1983, according to Hurd. In a November 2023 interview, she said that the old statement was seen as “rather generic.”
The finalized mission statement highlights that “students are engaged in a transformative educational experience that bridges the liberal arts, engineering, and interdisciplinary study,” according to the mission and values statement webpage.
The five values, which were composed after a series of campus-wide discussions, are engaged learning, community belonging, responsible citizenship, purposeful sustainability and institutional excellence.
Three drafts of the statement were revised throughout the early months of 2024. A previous iteration equated co-curricular pursuits — “including athletics” — with academics under institutional excellence. Faculty critics of the statement scrutinized it for a lack of prioritization of education, resulting in its withdrawal in the spring.
The statement was passed through Student Government in April following a series of discussions. Representatives from the organization could not be reached for comment.
The final draft centered its approach on emphasizing academics.
Multiple students approved of the statement, saying the statement meets their expectations for what the college should stand for.
“I believe that [Lafayette is] still an educational institution first and foremost,” CJ Tovar ’28 said. He highlighted the removal of athletics in the statement, saying that placing “athletics and academics on the same level would be against the ideals of the institution.”
“With knowledge and academia, you are developing skills and knowledge that will be invaluable to you no matter what you do,” Anoosh Ahsan ’28 said, supporting that the new values in the statement would cater to students across all academic disciplines.
Bob Sell, the chairman of the Board of Trustees, could not be reached for comment.
Elisabeth Seidel ’26 and Andreas Pelekis ’26 contributed reporting.