Defining the Mission

Below are verbatim comments about what the college's guiding mission should be, gathered during the Fall 2018 all-staff, all-faculty, and Board of Trustees meetings.

• Providing more professional opportunities for students to best prepare for the work force
• A liberal arts education and applied real-world practice experience for all students by the time they graduate
• Be a national and global leader in active, applied, community-based learning and research
• Be best at our strengths while remaining well-rounded.
• Integrate health and wellness into each area.
• Interjecting experiential learning into all aspects of the academic and co-curricular education of students.
• To graduate an IC student must have completed a philanthropy class, service/ volunteering.
• #1 in sustainability practices. Financial, environmental, and social living and learning community that incorporates the Ithaca community beyond the college.
• Embracing philanthropy and seeing it as a positive benefit.

• o become a center of innovation in student experiential learning (service learning, research, field work, internships, community outreach).
• Create opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to work together on community project which contribute to a better world.
• Create and provide an ecosystem for our youth to make mistakes, learn and grow in order to become successful members of society – however they define it.
• Challenging and rewarding environment for both students and staff.
• I want Ithaca to be recognized as a center of practice and innovation
• Have an expanded, deepened, and coordinated community-based learning/research effort that is integrated throughout the college/schools- Programs/opportunities/pathways for community engagement that draw/attract students/ faculty to IC. Strategic, impactful, connections between IC, local community and global world
• Provide a great liberal arts education at an affordable price
• We should aspire to be a campus w/the highest intellectual engagement—we are a college, but it is immeasurably anti-intellectual. Students leave here because they find it too easy. There isn’t a culture of intellectual engagement outside the classroom. We have great talks that no one shows up to. We need to change this, to learn to have intellectual engagement
• Leader for CREATIVE HUMANITIES for MA-granting institutions—Goal: of supporting students and faculty in engaging creative and intellectual development. Across fine arts (art, art history, theater, writing, music) and humanities (history, English, philosophy, art history), grad students, careers, new businesses
• To become a nationally recognized institution for its school of liberal arts and professional school education
• to promote the liberal arts meaningfully and in everything we do
• Create education that is meaningful for its students by creating an environment in which ideas are important