Since the establishment of the Mission Committee of the DePaul Board of Trustees in 2008, the committee has been charged with reviewing the university mission statement. Recently in 2016, they decided this would occur on a five-year cycle. This review process is occurring again during the 2020-2021 academic year.
Since the time the current mission statement was established in 1985-86, there have been only two revisions – one in 1991 and the other in 2016. For much of this time, then, the Board found the mission statement to be effective in articulating DePaul’s sense of mission. One common critique of the mission statement, however, has been its length. Some have longed for a shorter, more memorable and focused statement that many would describe as the best practice for institutional mission statements.
As the mission statement review process is initiated again this year, the Board of Trustees and university leadership have decided to undergo a more thorough and participatory review process and to strongly consider a revision of the current mission statement. The potential result of this process may be to revise the statement to be more concise and to reflect the needs, responsibilities and opportunities of DePaul’s Vincentian higher education in the current context and for the future.