Mission and Core Values
Mission Statement
“Wabash College educates men to think critically, act responsibly, lead effectively, and live humanely.”
Founded in 1832, Wabash College is an independent, liberal arts college for men with an enrollment of approximately 900 students. Its mission is excellence in teaching and learning within a community built on close and caring relationships among students, faculty, and staff.
Wabash offers qualified young men a superior education, fostering, in particular, independent intellectual inquiry, critical thought, and clear written and oral expression. The College educates its students broadly in the traditional curriculum of the liberal arts, while also requiring them to pursue concentrated study in one or more disciplines. Wabash emphasizes our manifold, but shared, cultural heritage. Our students come from diverse economic, social, and cultural backgrounds; the College helps these students engage these differences and live humanely with them. Wabash also challenges its students to appreciate the changing nature of the global society and prepares them for the responsibilities of leadership and service in it.
The College carries out its mission in a residential setting in which students take personal and group responsibility for their actions. Wabash provides for its students an unusually informal, egalitarian, and participatory environment which encourages young men to adopt a life of intellectual and creative growth, self-awareness, and physical activity. The College seeks to cultivate qualities of character and leadership in students by developing not only their analytic skills, but also sensitivity to values, and judgment and compassion required of citizens living in a difficult and uncertain world. We expect a Wabash education to bring joy in the life of the mind, to reveal the pleasures in the details of common experience, and to affirm the necessity for and rewards in helping others.
Our Core Values
A rigorous liberal arts education that fosters
- An appreciation for the intellectual and physical aspects of a good life
- An understanding of and appreciation for other cultures
A personal context to teaching and learning that encourages
- Candid, respectful, face-to-face conversations
- Freedom of thought
- A local scholarly community that creates lifelong relationships
Individual responsibility and trust that are
- Based on moral and ethical awareness
- Expressed in the Gentleman’s Rule
- Required for leadership and teamwork
A socially, economically, and ethnically diverse student body characterized by
- A dedication to the serious pursuit of learning
- A culture of competition without malice
- A few years of residence, a lifetime of loyalty
A tradition and philosophy of independence that
- Keeps the College from external control
- Allows the Wabash community to shape significantly its own destiny
- Promotes independence and self-reliance in its students and graduates.