Dear Campus Community,
All of us together — students, faculty and staff — work hard to create and sustain an environment that fosters the outstanding teaching and path-breaking discovery that is the core of our mission. The spirit of a university is as essential to its success as are the returns on endowment, alumni contributions, student recruitment and research funding. Indeed, that sense of community is vital to our distinctive identity at this University, where we pride ourselves on what we can achieve even while being much smaller than our peers.
But that also makes all the more important a reminder about our commitment to our academic mission, to each other and to our values. Three of those values – mutual respect, tolerance and civility – are especially important because they affect how we interact with each other on a daily basis.