Speeches & publications

Ten Characteristics of a Great University

1. A great university welcomes all peoples, respecting their differences, while teaching tolerance for each human being; a great American university demonstrates the value of a democratic way of life, thereby ensuring a democratic future.
2. A great university creates new knowledge of the world and its peoples, its capacity for research a manifestation of its belief that the discovery of new knowledge ensures a better future.
3. A great university believes in the sanctity of the relationship between student and teacher, the sharing of knowledge in the communion of resulting in the best possible hope for human progress.
4. A great university recognizes its obligation to contribute to an educated workforce for the society that supports it, particularly responding to labor shortages as they occur in that society.
5. A great university serves the society that supports it. It helps to ensure food, shelter, and health care for all people. It supports a self-sustaining natural environment, the perpetuation of public education, an affordable health care system, and economic well-being.
6. A great university is an international university, one whose programs have an impact on the entire world because its faculty think beyond local and national borders, and its students understand the inter-relatedness of a world where ideas and capital flow easily across geographical borders.
7. A great university recognizes the wisdom of investing in the human development of the work force, so that each employee is able to pursue personal and professional goals without institutional obstacles. A great university has no glass ceiling.
8. A great university recognizes the physical legacy that it passes to the generation who will work and study there in the future and therefore maintains, preserves, and enhances its facilities and physical setting.
9. A great university recognizes its responsibility to conserve the public and private monies that enable it to educate, research and serve. The public trust that accompanies those funds demands that they be allocated so as to achieve maximum efficiency and effectiveness.
10. A great university is one that has identified its priorities and planned with sufficient intelligence to ensure that those priorities receive the resources necessary for their accomplishment.