La Salle University

La Salle University, dedicated in the traditions of the Christian Brothers to excellence in teaching and to concern for both ultimate values and for the individual values of its students, is a private Roman Catholic University committed to providing a liberal education of both general and specialized studies.

As a Catholic university, La Salle strives to offer, through effective teaching, quality education founded on the idea that one's intellectual and spiritual development go hand in hand, complementing and fulfilling each other. The University has, as its basic purpose, the free search for truth by teaching its students the basic skills, knowledge, and values that they will need for a life of human dignity. The programs of the University also aim at preparing students for informed service and progressive leadership in their communities and to fulfilling the immediate and final goals of their lives.

Goals:
to recruit and maintain a distinguished faculty with diverse educational and ethnic backgrounds as guided by the principles of equal opportunity and affirmative action and sustained through programs of development, research assistance, and retraining;
to recruit and retain qualified students, while at the same time striving to attract a more diverse student body: socially, geographically, economically, and racially;
to maintain class sizes small enough to promote active student participation and a close working relationship between students and faculty;
to provide quality support services that assist the learning process;
to provide learning experiences in both traditional and non-traditional settings;
to continue to foster an atmosphere supportive of interdisciplinary learning;
to provide opportunities for part-time undergraduate and graduate study, chiefly oriented toward attainment of degrees, for students whose personal circumstances make full-time study impossible;
to provide co-curricular opportunities which are designed to stimulate significant change and growth in the social, emotional, spiritual and physical development of students;
to establish advisement procedures which assist students in making valid educational and career choices;
to provide resources as appropriate for the transition to a more residential institution of regional scope;
to sustain an atmosphere of collegiality and trust in which matters of policy and procedural change are recognized as the mutual province of faculty, students, and administration.
As a Christian Brothers University, La Salle continues in the Catholic traditions of the innovative educator John Baptist de La Salle, who founded the order. The University engages in programs in which students' personal, social and religious values may take root and in which students may grow in mature attitudes and behavior in all human relationships. The University strives to foster an environment of faith which produces a reciprocal respect among all persons in the community and to establish an atmosphere in which community members may openly bear witness to their convictions on world peace and social justice.

Goals:
to continue to encourage the presence and influence of the Christian Brothers on campus;
to provide opportunities for worship and celebration and to maintain an active Campus Ministry;
to undertake theological and religious study in a systematic and critical way and to investigate interrelationships which emerge with other disciplines;
to maintain a fiscal policy which allows the University to attract students from modest income levels;
to provide educational opportunities and resources for the economically and educationally disadvantaged;
to continue to provide to the residents of the immediate La Salle neighborhood the educational resources and expertise to improve the quality of their lives.
As a private University, La Salle strives to determine its own policies, thus providing the option of private higher education in an area increasingly dominated by large public institutions.

Goals:
to maintain autonomous academic admissions standards and an independent structure for governance;
to determine our own fiscal, curricular and recruitment policies.
As an undergraduate institution, La Salle is committed to a liberal arts education which assists students in liberating themselves from narrow interests, prejudices, and perspectives, and in learning to observe reality with precision, to judge events and opinions critically and independently, to think logically, to communicate effectively, and to sharpen aesthetic perception. Students are encouraged to seek wisdom; that is, to grasp those basic principles which can give order to particular facts. The University urges students to confront the ultimate questions of human experience: who am I? where does my destiny lie? how am I to reach it?

Goals:
to maintain, as the foundation of all learning, a common, comprehensive liberal arts core which will challenge all undergraduate students with courses addressing the analytic process (philosophical and/or scientific), the communication process (oral and written; emitted and received), and the historical, intellectual, and creative growth of humanity;
to require students to gain thorough foundational knowledge of the subject matter of one or more disciplines;
to expose students to an optimal mix of required and elective courses in a variety of disciplines, providing advisement to help determine the elective choices which best serve the students' educational needs.
As a graduate institution, La Salle strives to support the career aspirations of students and meet the needs of society. Graduate education at La Salle emphasizes the students' ability to apply universals and specifics to actual situations, to distinguish relationships, to analyze critically, to rearrange component ideas into new wholes and to make judgments based on external criteria.

Goals:
to offer graduate programs which enable students to augment their academic backgrounds, to acquire both practical and theoretical knowledge in their chosen field, and to enhance their professional competencies;
to offer graduate programs which enable students to correlate and synthesize information from various fields, to relate the theoretical to the practical, and to develop values in the liberal arts tradition;
to offer graduate programs which are designed to prepare students to advance in their professional careers and to pursue appropriate further studies.