Mission

Guilford College's mission is to provide a transformative, practical and excellent liberal arts education that produces critical thinkers in an inclusive, diverse, environment, guided by Quaker testimonies of community, equality, integrity, peace, and simplicity and emphasizing the creative problem-solving skills, experience, enthusiasm, and international perspectives necessary to promote positive change in the world.

Toward that end the college provides:

• student-centered instruction that nurtures each individual amid an intentionally diverse community.
• a challenging academic program that fosters critical and creative thinking through the development of essential skills: analysis, inquiry, communication, consensus-building, problem-solving, and leadership.
• a global perspective that values people of other cultures and the natural environment in which we all live.
• a values-rich education that explores the ethical dimension of knowledge and promotes honesty, compassion, integrity, courage, and respect for the individual.
• access to work and service opportunities that forge a connection between thought and action.

Guilford seeks above all to create a special kind of learning community. We are not perfect at this. Our goal of creating independent thinkers and change agents necessarily pulls against the needs of community, and our great diversity of backgrounds sometimes works against our professed acceptance of and equal respect for all individuals. We are as a community at best in a perpetual state of becoming.

Nevertheless, in writing about Guilford in Colleges that Change Lives, Loren Pope describes how there is "a special sense of family here." He notes of the college that "it truly is a friendly place," while also being "a stimulating place where the teachers care, where they expect a lot, and where they provide the encouragement as well as the challenge to get young people to do things they had no idea they could do." Guilford, he concludes, is "a fine example of a college family that is doubling talents."

We intend to continue to work toward being that community: a learning community defined somewhat paradoxically by both challenge and nurture, a community which produces compassionate graduates who are independent thinkers, risk-takers, and change agents possessing a strong moral compass.