The Previous Northeastern Mission

1987 MISSION STATEMENT
"The Quest for Excellence"

Northeastern University is dedicated to providing a broad diversity of students with the benefits of an academic program of the highest quality.  Northeastern’s basic mission as a large urban university founded on the cooperative model of education remains what it has always been: to provide individuals with the opportunity for upward mobility through excellence in education.  The University is committed to achieving excellence through high-quality instruction in a liberal/professional curriculum that values equally knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as a means to success in the workplace, and knowledge as a cornerstone of personal achievement and satisfaction.

By placing strong emphasis on professional education, the University will continue to encourage and provide the opportunity for students to obtain the specific knowledge and skills required for a lifetime of productive work in society.  By committing itself to the research and scholarly activities of its faculty, the University will continue to encourage and provide the opportunity for teachers to make contributions to the body of knowledge from which society draws to sustain progress.  By building a physical campus with the facilities and amenities that are conducive and necessary to the educational enterprise, the University will continue to encourage and provide the opportunity for all its constituents—students, teachers, employees, and neighbors—to weave the educational process into their daily lives.

Excellence in teaching is the quintessential goal of the University.  Teaching remains a central activity for Northeastern University faculty members.  The University is committed to improving teaching skills and to evaluating and recognizing faculty members in good measure for their teaching ability.  Closely allied to this commitment is the insistence on excellence in undergraduate programming.  Excellence in programs of graduate study and responsiveness to the needs of students who seek to extend their studies beyond the undergraduate level are also central to the mission of the University.  The University must be assured that its offerings to both undergraduate and graduate students are rigorous, relevant, and rewarding in order both to provide a solid structure for educational excellence and to attract and retain students at all levels.

The University remains committed to the search for knowledge through research as well as through scholarly and artistic undertakings.  Although research in many instances is independent of teaching, excellence in teaching exists only in an environment that encourages and demands high levels of quality research activity.  Vibrant programs of research are essential in themselves, but they also keep teaching fresh, acute, relevant, and accurate while they maintain the vital connection between academic and professional worlds.

The University believes that its educational mission can be achieved only if the student body is not limited by economic status, cultural or racial background, geographic origin, sex, or age.  The University is committed to finding, attracting, and keeping the ablest high school graduates as well as those whose promise suggests they can benefit from a Northeastern education.  The role of the University is to challenge students to perform to the limits of their intellectual capacity and to assist them in doing so.  The University intends to structure its programs to better attain this goal with a student body of widely varied academic talents, abilities, and accomplishments.

Northeastern has a long history of serving the educational needs of the non-traditional student in its University College and life-long learning programs.  The University will continue its commitment to provide first rate degree and non-degree programs for those people whose circumstances prevent them from following the standard undergraduate and graduate program of studies by offering excellent courses and programs outside the typical college time frame.  The hallmarks of these programs are a renewed determination to maintain the same quality in teaching, relevance in offerings, and high standards in performance that are characteristic of the University’s day programs.ooperative education has been the keystone of Northeastern’s uniqueness for three quarters of a century.  As a greater and greater percentage of the nation’s population becomes a part of the workforce and as the technological revolution continues daily to change the nature of work, the University must rededicate itself to keeping pace with those changes.  The cooperative plan provides the ideal vehicle for doing this, but the University must continue to explore new ways of adapting the cooperative model to a changing workplace.

A new sense of place at Northeastern has resulted from marked improvements in the campus and from dramatic development of Northeastern’s neighborhood over the past ten years.  The University is determined, over the next ten years, to make its campus even more accommodating for its students, its teachers, and its employees.  The University is committed to constructing a complex of academic and research buildings centered around a new library, to increasing residential facilities for its students, to developing new performing arts, recreational and athletic facilities, and to providing more parking structures on the periphery of the campus.  The University understands that the quality of learning and teaching, as well as the ability to attract and retain students, is in good measure determined by the ambiance of place.

The University is also determined to maintain and strengthen its reputation as a friend to the City of Boston and a partner of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.  The University’s obligation to serve the community of which it is an integral part is fulfilled primarily through the educational enterprise.  Although a private university, Northeastern is considered by many to be a public resource that can be relied on for assistance.  Through its numerous outreach programs, the University has made striking contributions to the community in the applied social sciences, in high technology, and in the arts.  Northeastern will continue to contribute in these and other ways to the region’s overall quality of life and to its economic vitality.

The University is committed to communicating to all its current and potential constituencies its dedication to excellence in teaching, in programs, in scholarship, in research, in facilities, and in ambiance.  The most important constituencies of the University, for its fiscal stability as well as for its intellectual vitality, are prospective and current students.  The blueprint for excellence set forth in this document attempts to put Northeastern University’s vision of itself in words.