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Mission Statement
Mission
Goucher College is dedicated to a liberal arts education that prepares students within a broad, humane perspective for a life of inquiry, creativity, and critical and analytical thinking.
Ideals
The college's principal objectives are to help each student master significant areas of knowledge and skills while developing an appreciation for individual and cultural diversity, a sense of social responsibility and a system of personal and professional ethics.
Goucher believes these goals are best achieved in an environment that responds to students both as individuals and as members of multiple groups. Accordingly, education at Goucher is based on an expanding sense of community--a community where discourse is valued and practiced, where students attend small classes and interact closely with faculty and one another, and where students can participate in and lead extracurricular programs.
In undertaking this mission, Goucher recognizes the centrality of four curricular and extracurricular themes:- Scholarship and academic excellence in traditional disciplines in the Humanities, Social Sciences, Natural Sciences/Mathematics and the Arts.
- An interdisciplinary approach to important areas that cross or transcend the boundaries of traditional disciplines, including world peace, the environment, and the nature of knowledge.
- An international outlook extending liberal arts education beyond Western cultures to encompass the perspectives and achievements of other members of the world community.
- Commitment to experiential learning on and off campus as well as abroad, requiring students to apply and extend what has been learned in the classroom.
Community Principles
Who We Are
Goucher College is a community of individuals who value learning, self-expression, and diversity. We, the students, staff, and faculty of the Goucher community, support one another even as we recognize our differences. Each community member contributes to and, in turn, is enriched by
- the Goucher community,
- the communities of metropolitan Baltimore,
- our home communities, and
- the communities of the world
While working, studying and traveling on behalf of Goucher, we recognize that we represent the Goucher community, and we will conduct ourselves in a manner that reflects the following commitments:
- Respect: We will treat everyone within our community with respect and learn from our differences. When conflicts arise, we will work together to come up with mutually beneficial resolutions. We also commit to respect and protect the environment on our campus and in the world.
- Inclusion: We will acknowledge and embrace the unique gifts and differences of our community members. Furthermore, we seek to include those who may feel excluded.
- Communication: We will communicate with the intent to listen and learn from others while placing a premium on maintaining a safe space for those involved. We will create opportunities for dialogue so that a variety of voices can be heard.
- Service and Social Justice: We value active participation in bettering the Goucher community as well as those communities beyond the college where we live,work, and serve. In addition, we seek to understand the issues of privilege and oppression that exist in these communities.
- Responsibility: We understand that we are accountable for our own actions, opinions, and beliefs, and for ensuring that our actions are conducive to the safety and well-being of others.
Who We Are Becoming
As members of a dynamic community that is constantly in transition and continuously seeking improvement, we strive to live out the commitments that make us a community and to foster the potential we see in each other.
Diversity Statement
As a dynamic community of learners, we renew our commitment to social justice and reaffirm diversity and multiculturalism as fundamental and valued components of our liberal arts mission and institutional ethos. Because we learn by being exposed to and challenged by different ways of seeing and understanding the world, we value diversity in all dimensions—voice, experience, perspective, heritage, culture, values, class, gender, race, ability, age, sexual orientation, and religion—and strive to build and sustain a richly diverse and multicultural curriculum and program. Education, by this compass, is necessarily transformative, aiming, no less, to transcend boundaries of historic and systemic oppression and power. The heart of our method requires remaining open to the personal and community transformation that inevitably comes from a deep and sustained exposure to different ways of seeing the world. This readiness to engage and understand difference, even while we endeavor to "prove all things; hold fast that which is good," at times causes us discomfort and challenges our personal tenets and values. We approach this ongoing work with courage, integrity, care, and respect.
Our commitment to diversity and multiculturalism shall inform all aspects of the institution, including curriculum, co-curricular activities, community governance and campus culture. Indeed, we seek to carry these values into the world at large; to promote tolerance, inclusiveness, democratic values, and learning across differences everywhere; and to help shape the local and global discourse about diversity and multiculturalism and their evolving relationship with the broadest possible educational enterprise.