Identity

The University of Iowa is a comprehensive research university with particular distinction in the arts, humanities, and sciences, and a wide array of exceptional professional programs. While serving as the state’s most comprehensive institution of higher education, the University also enjoys a national and international reputation for excellence and competes at that level for the best faculty and the most talented graduate and professional students.

Mission

Upon founding The University of Iowa in 1847, Iowa’s first legislature entrusted it with a threefold mission of teaching, research, and public service. In pursuing that mission today, the University seeks to advance scholarly and creative endeavor through leading-edge research and artistic production; to use this research and creativity to enhance undergraduate, graduate, and professional education, health care, and other services provided to the people of Iowa, the nation, and the world; and to educate students for success and personal fulfillment in an increasingly diverse and global environment.

Aspiration

The University of Iowa aspires to attract the most talented faculty, staff, and students; to provide an environment where they can discover and fulfill their potential; and thereby to realize its promise, which is to become one of the ten most distinguished public universities in the country.

Core Values

In planning, setting priorities, and carrying out every aspect of its mission, The University of Iowa is guided by seven interdependent commitments:

• Excellence
• Learning
• Community
• Diversity
• Integrity
• Respect
• Responsibility

The University of Iowa is a community of faculty, staff, students, alumni, and friends who seek to advance knowledge and foster learning across a broad range of academic endeavors. So that learning and creative expression may flourish, the University takes seriously its obligation to protect academic freedom and free expression; maintain a safe, supportive, healthy, and humane environment; and nourish a system of collaborative decision making based on mutual respect and shared governance. Because diversity, broadly defined, advances its mission of teaching, research, and service, the University is dedicated to an inclusive community in which people of different cultural, national, individual, and academic backgrounds encounter one another in a spirit of cooperation, openness, and shared appreciation. The University recognizes its accountability to the people of Iowa and the need to exercise responsible stewardship over the intellectual and material resources entrusted to it, including the need to direct those resources to programs and initiatives that are central to the University’s core mission. In all that it does, the University measures itself by exacting standards, promotes continuous improvement, honors excellence and high aspiration, and holds its community as a whole to the highest degree of honesty, fairness, and personal integrity.

Culture

The culture of The University of Iowa has been formed through historic adherence to core values. The culture is characterized by collaborative decision making within a community that fosters open and consultative communication.

Goals

The University has identified the following five goals—one each in the areas of undergraduate education, graduate and professional education and research, diversity, vitality, and engagement—as key to achieving its aspiration.

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