Critiquing University Mission Statements and Higher Education

Introduction: What a Mission Statement Promises

A university has set forth a set of Strategic Directions — its version of a mission statement — to guide the university's priorities during a seven-year period. This document claims that the university system is "committed to improving the social, economic and environmental well-being of current and future generations" ("Strategic Directions," 2015). For any student or faculty member, actual or prospective, it is worth asking to what extent the university system follows through with the mission set forth in its Strategic Directions.

Blueprint or Platonic Ideal?

One difficulty with this line of questioning is that it raises certain questions about the nature of a document like this. Is an institutional mission statement meant to be understood as a ready-made, self-subsistent blueprint — the kind of document that offers a vision of something concrete that will actually be built? Or is it meant to be some kind of Platonic ideal, something aimed at but never fully met?

For a document that attempts to project the university seven years into the future, one also ends up imagining what it will look like when read in retrospect — whether the document has been a blueprint or a fantasy. One way or the other, the Strategic Directions themselves (and we must bear in mind the self-identified plural character of the text) envision improvement in "social, economic and environmental well-being." It is worth noting how much this dovetails with contemporary concerns about universities, where social matters — ranging from campus sexual assault to racial inclusiveness — are a subject of heated national debate, and the economic and environmental future of college-aged millennials is a subject for bleak pessimism.

For an eighteen-year-old who potentially faces crippling debt when all schooling is finished, and who is told by reputable scientists that the chance of the human race surviving this century is roughly 50-50, a seven-year plan for improvement seems a little dilatory.

The Language of Efficiency and Market Logic

The remainder of the Directions generates a well-meaning laundry list of content which spills over into adjacent texts such as the High Performance Mission Driven System. What does this latter document promise? "Significant operating efficiencies, as well as ... multiple entry points, pathways, and exit points" (HPMDS 2015). There is something slightly morbid about describing a university as though one were describing improvements to the freeway system in greater Los Angeles. The language here — half MBA voodoo incantation, half automotive jargon — is presumably intended to suggest that the university offers value for money in an era when higher education frankly looks like the American economy's newest and shiniest bubble.

Conclusion: The University in the Rigged Casino

The lurking implications of this language position the university within a particular moment in American higher education — a moment when a college degree is more necessary than ever to participate at all in the rigged casino that constitutes the American economy, but when the price of such a degree vastly exceeds any value it can have beyond the purely symbolic.

Works Cited

James, Keith. "Corrupt State University: The Organizational Psychology of Native Experience in Higher Education." In Mihesuah, Devon Abbott, and Wilson, Angela Cavender (eds.) Indigenizing the Academy: Transforming Scholarship and Empowering Communities. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

[University]. "High Performance Mission Driven System." 2015.

[University]. "Strategic Directions." 2015.