Mission, Vision, & Values
Mission Statement
We are a distinctive public liberal arts college that welcomes and inspires students to develop their knowledge and skills to build a better world. Our supportive, inclusive community is exceptional in cultivating creativity, engagement, and discovery. We find strength in diversity, joy in growth, and fulfillment in lifelong learning.
Vision
We will cultivate a distinctive, equity-centered, public honors college experience that propels learners to positively impact society.
Values
The Geneseo campus community is guided by our beliefs in and commitments to the following values:
- Learning: Embracing high expectations for intellectual inquiry, critical thinking, scholarly exploration, and personal growth.
- Creativity: Empowering a spirit of innovation that inspires intellectual curiosity, self-expression, and problem-solving.
- Belonging: Welcoming a diverse campus community that supports and celebrates different identities, promotes equity and inclusion, and respects the ideas and contributions of each individual.
- Civic Engagement: Encouraging active participation grounded in self-reflection, empathy, and an ethical commitment to the common good of our local and global communities.
- Sustainability: Building a culture of well-being that integrates and applies principles of environmental, social, and economic stewardship informed by an understanding of the past and our obligations to the future.
Community Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
At SUNY Geneseo, we are a community of students, staff, faculty, and administrators living and working together in a spirit of inquiry so that, individually and collectively, we may achieve our full potential.
Our community extends to the many graduates, retirees, and others who remain actively engaged in advancing our mission and values as a public liberal arts college.
Located in the historic homelands of the Seneca Nation of Indians and Tonawanda Seneca Nation, we at SUNY Geneseo have an obligation to recognize all who, through history or identity, have been marginalized or oppressed, made invisible or silenced.
We recognize that our own identities are many and varied, forged by culture, circumstance, and choice. Some of us inhabit multiple identities where histories of exclusion or injustice intersect.
We are here to listen, to learn, to teach, to debate, to change, to grow. We should all be safe to pursue these goals at SUNY Geneseo while being who we are. Together, we commit ourselves to pluralism, cultivating a community that respects difference and promotes a sense of inclusion and belonging.
Our differences, including those of opinion or perspective, make us stronger. Together, we commit ourselves to sustaining and expanding the diversity of our community and to making equity for all members of our diverse community a measure of our success.
We share responsibility for achieving these goals, and for making Geneseo a place where each of us may contribute to and realize the promise of public liberal education: to broaden understanding, heighten awareness, awaken empathy, and foster empowerment.
Endorsed by the College Senate and approved by the President of SUNY Geneseo, October 2018.
Questions, comments, and concerns about this Community Commitment to Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion can be directed to the Chief Diversity Officer (ode@geneseo.edu).
Geneseo’s Statement on Sustainability
SUNY Geneseo calls upon all members of our community to embrace sustainability as a core value, including a commitment to its constitutive principles of ecological, social, and economic justice. We recognize the critical role of higher education in creating a sustainable society. Through teaching, research, service, and institutional conduct we strive to nurture the values, skills and knowledge necessary to sustain and enhance human and non-human life on the planet.
The college understands that sustainability is a process of building support for societal and intergenerational equity and a shared sense of responsibility for the ethical stewardship of our social and natural environment. We endorse the broad scientific consensus that human demands on the planet threaten the ecological, social and economic resources upon which our global society depends.
As a public liberal arts college, we seek solutions to these increasingly complex, interdisciplinary problems that are consistent with our shared values and ideals. Recognizing that the promotion of sustainability is central to the mission of the college, SUNY Geneseo calls upon its faculty, students and staff to foster a culture of sustainable and responsible citizenship on campus. By minimizing the environmental impact of our institutional operations and integrating the principles of sustainability throughout our academic disciplines and co-curricular life we can begin to realize a more profound and enduring form of prosperity for current and future generations.
Approved by the college Senate May 2013
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