LMU Mission Statement
Mission
Loyola Marymount's Mission and Goals Statement, approved by the Board of Trustees in 1990, succinctly states in its preamble the university's three-fold mission:
- The encouragement of learning
- The education of the whole person
- The service of faith and the promotion of justice
Identity
These often quoted phrases are at the heart of the campus community’s communal self-understanding. When unpacked, they tell us much about LMU’s identity as a Catholic, Jesuit/Marymount university
The Encouragement of Learning
The encouragement of learning is the first pillar of the mission. Considered together with the pursuit of academic excellence, it constitutes the overarching theme of current strategic planning that envisions LMU’s growth into one of the nation’s distinguished Catholic universities.
As a Catholic university, LMU shares a rich intellectual and cultural heritage that is marked by characteristics such as these:
- It views the world as sacramental and seeks to find God in all things.
- It esteems both imagination and intellect.
- It takes philosophical and theological thinking seriously.
- It engages in ethical discourse and pursues the common good.
- It eschews the supposition that there can be value-free facts.
- It seeks an integration of knowledge in which “faith and reason bear harmonious witness to the unity of all truth” (John Paul II, Ex Corde Ecclesiae, 1990, par. 17).
As foundational for inquiry and learning, and consistent with Catholic emphases since the Second Vatican Council, Loyola Marymount intentionally strives to build an intercultural community, actively recruiting students, faculty, and staff from ethnically diverse backgrounds. In a similar way, the university places a premium on ecumenical and inter-religious dialogue. All religions are taken seriously, and a genuine welcome is extended to faculty, staff, and students of diverse faith traditions. This means that at LMU the encouragement of learning is a radical commitment to free and honest inquiry in teaching and research—but always with reverence before the mystery of the universe and openness to the Transcendent.
The Education of the Whole Person
With roots in the spiritual humanism of the renaissance, the university’s Jesuit and Marymount traditions have as one of their hallmarks an abiding concern for the education of the whole person. Growth in knowledge and mastery of a discipline are only part of the total educational experience. As one alumnus has remarked, “I consider my time at LMU a rite of passage to adulthood when I grew intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually.” This kind of integrated personal growth reflects what is traditionally understood by the education of the whole person. It takes place not only in the classrooms, laboratories, and library, but also in the chapels, residence halls, and recreation centers, on the athletic fields, in off-campus service projects, in campus-ministry retreats, and, indeed, wherever students gather. Faculty and staff all contribute to it when they establish a personal relationship with students, listen to them, respect their individuality, and help them to develop their unique talents for lives of freedom and responsibility, leadership and service.
At its best, the education of the whole person comes to fruition not simply in personal integration but in a sense of one’s place in the global village and concern for those in need. From LMU’s perspective, today’s whole persons are men and women with and for others—visionary men and women able to see beyond the bounds of culture and class and eager to work for the common good wherever it is thwarted by economic, political, or social injustice. This understanding of the education of the whole person provides an easy segue to the third key phrase in the Mission Statement.
The Service of Faith and the Promotion of Justice
In linking active concern for the poor to the service of faith, Loyola Marymount follows the lead of its sponsoring religious communities and the post-Vatican II Church in acknowledging that work for social justice is a requirement--not simply an option--of biblical faith. Even while making common cause with men and women whose work for social justice is motivated by noble secular values, LMU finds its deepest inspiration for the promotion of justice in the concern of the Hebrew scriptures for “the widow, the orphan, and the stranger in the land” and the preference of the Gospels for the “least” of Jesus’ brothers and sisters.
LMU’s decades-old impetus to provide educational opportunities for under-represented groups, its long-standing community-service opportunities for students, and its more recently established faculty grants for faith-and-justice research and curriculum development are all part of the university’s commitment “to work for justice as the gospel requires” (to borrow a phrase from Sister Mary Milligan, speaking as provincial superior of the Marymount Sisters to the university's Board of Trustees)
There are many opportunities for members of our community to reach out to those in need, but doing good for the poor without a change of heart falls short of the university’s faith-and-justice mission. The student who returned from a spring-break immersion to report that “I went there thinking I would serve the people of Appalachia but had no idea how they would change my perception of materialism” speaks to this distinction—and verifies an important pedagogical insight expressed by Fr. Peter-Hans Kolvenbach, superior-general of the Jesuits: “When the heart is touched by experience, the mind may— be challenged to change.” The service of faith and the promotion of justice thus looks toward attitudinal change as a prompt for students and all associated with LMU—to understand the causes of injustice and to work for humanizing changes in society.
Read the complete Mission and Goals Statement. Request a printed copy from rcaro@lmu.edu.