Every college and university has a mission statement. No one pays much attention to them. I doubt that any student has ever said, “I want to go there because I admire its mission statement!” Nevertheless, mission statements can tell us something about the mindset of the people in charge.

Ten of the UNC institutions recently updated their mission statements, and, in today’s Martin Center article, Graham Hillard looks at them. The expected bad news is that they indicate further leftist domination in most of the system.

Hillard writes, “Earlier this year, 10 UNC-System institutions asked the Board of Governors for permission to change the statements that allegedly ‘capture the core focus’ of their operations. Initially approved by the Committee on Educational Planning, Policies, and Programs, the alterations in question went before the full Board in July and were authorized as part of the consent agenda.”

So, what do we learn about those schools?

There was one outlier, Appalachian State, where the mission statement actually was shortened and made less ideological. At the others, however, the new mission statements are worse than before.

Hillard writes:

UNC Charlotte, for example, scrapped an ambitious line about “internationally competitive programs” in favor of a cheap promise to build “a diverse and inclusive institution.” (Maintaining international competitiveness takes actual work.) Winston-Salem State University, which previously claimed to ground its offerings “in the tradition of liberal education,” has apparently decided that such thinking is passé. Their new goal, not yet updated on the website but duly approved by the Board of Governors, is to “produce equity-minded … citizens,” a naked admission that the institution has ceased to educate and will henceforth create an army of activists.

Ugh — “equity-minded citizens.” That indicates a preoccupation with leftist goals, not with actual education.

Missing from those new mission statements, Hillard observes, is anything about intellectual diversity.

He concludes, “In sum, universities that add silly phrases to their mission statements (or delete wise ones) will find that the alterations trickle down to their real day-to-day work. Should the System’s largest institutions, N.C. State and Chapel Hill, decide to update their own prose, they should keep that lesson in mind.”