| The Mission and Values of Rockhurst
The expression of Rockhurst's mission and values is the result of a collaborative work among faculty, staff, students and volunteers as they reflected upon our traditions and ideals. Rockhurst's mission guides the decision-making process throughout the College community, from academic programs to fundraising and budgeting. It guides the development of our five-year Strategic Plan and our 20-year Campus Master Plan. Rockhurst epitomizes an emphasis on values, a challenging curriculum and a commitment to developing each student's intellectual potential and moral character. These values are at the heart of 450 years of Jesuit educational tradition. We share this tradition with 27 other Jesuit colleges and universities in the U.S. and with hundreds of other Jesuit schools, institutes and educational networks worldwide. Our Guiding Vision To be counted among the best student-centered learning communities in the nation. Our Mission Rockhurst College is a learning community, centered on a strong undergraduate liberal education in the arts and sciences and excellence in graduate professional education in business, management, the health professions and humanities/education. It is Catholic and Jesuit, involved in the life and growth of the city and region, and committed to the service of the contemporary world. 1. A learning community. The Rockhurst community believes in the intrinsic value of the intellectual life, and in the disinterested pursuit of truth. It is a community of hope, confident that the active, free and persistent search for understanding lies at the heart of what it means to be truly human. The search is a shared endeavor in which faculty, students and administrators contribute their various gifts and dispositions of scholarship, research, imagination, openness, judgment, joy, vision, experience, trust and generosity in order to cooperate with, challenge and move one another to higher levels of intellectual and moral growth. 2. A comprehensive college providing a liberal education in the arts and sciences. Rockhurst believes in the enduring value of those fields of study - such as literature, rhetoric, history, philosophy, theology, natural and social sciences and mathematics - and of those masterpieces of writing, music and art that constitute our comm9on cultural heritage. At the same time its curriculum strives to be both general and specialized - broad and retrospective enough to make students conscious of their roots, and modern and concentrated enough to prepare them for both general and specialized careers - confident that this balanced intellectual development is truly liberating in the fullest sense of that word. Above all, liberal education is education for life, intended to cultivate those dispositions of mind and spirit which keep the love of learning and the awareness of moral responsibility alive through success, crisis and tragedy, even until death. 3. A Catholic college. Rockhurst is part of a community of faith, a pilgrim church on a journey through history toward an ulitmate union with God and will all humankind. Its intellectual search for truth is instilled with the confidence that faith and reason are allies in a common quest. The College expresses its Catholic character by inculding the sacred Scripture and the Christian classics in its curriculum, by its liturgical life, by its emphasis on the relationship between social justice and Christian morality, by its ecumenical openness to other religious traditions, and by trying to maintain an atmosphere of respect and sensitivity toward the ultimate dignity of every person. 4. A Jesuit college. To be a Jesuit today, said the 32nd General Congregation of the Society of Jesus, is "to engage, under the standard of the cross, in the crucial struggle of our time: the struggle for faith and that struggle for justice which it includes." It is hoped that somehow the mission and meaning of Jesuit life can be shared with the larger college community. Throughout its 450-year history, Jeduit education has come to mean commitment to high intellectual and ethical standards, personal concern for every student and, consistent with the Gospels and the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius, the ability to "find God in all thing," particularly in the poor and oppressed. 5. Involved in the city and the world. Liberal education is education for citizenship. Thus Rockhurst devotes its resources to enhancing the quality of life of all the citizens, rich and poor alike, of metropolitan Kansas City, of its own neighborhood, and of all the other communities in which its students and alumni/ae live and work. At the same time students much become citizens of the world, conscious that all of their personal decisions have economic and moral implications for both people of other lands and future generations. They should look upon the earth and all its people and love them, see them as a world and as people they have learned to serve. Summary of Mission To sum up our mission for today, indeed for every day in our campus life, the following key themes stand out:
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