Belmont University _ Graduate Catalog


Belmont's Governing Ideas

Our vision, mission and values jointly known as the university's "governing ideas" distinguish us as a university that seeks to serve students from diverse backgrounds within a Christian community. These ideas honor our past, define our present, and describe our future. The statements honor our past by building upon the principles of academic excellence, Christian community, and service to others that have long been the hallmarks of a Belmont education. Our present is defined, by our governing ideas, in proclaiming the student-centered nature of a Belmont education, the ends to which we at Belmont engage in the experience of teaching and learning. Finally, our governing ideas enhance our future because our work to achieve this high calling is continual.

As a Belmont University family of students, faculty, staff, and board, we value honesty, mutual respect, and listening and learning from everyone which is the foundation that ensures our efforts to build the promising future that is uniquely Belmont's.

Robert C. Fisher, President

Belmont University Mission, Vision and Values

Statement of Purpose

Belmont University is a student-centered Christian community providing an academically challenging education that enables men and women of diverse backgrounds to engage and transform the world with disciplined intelligence, compassion, courage and faith.

  • Belmont University is student-centered . The university provides opportunities for the student to develop intellectually, spiritually, socially, and physically through experiences of leadership and collaboration, of success and failure and of choice. Faculty, administration, and staff commit themselves to guide and to challenge students to develop their full potential in order to lead lives of meaning and purpose.

  • Belmont University is a Christian community that presents Jesus as the Christ and as the model for personal behavior. Students are encouraged to commit themselves to high moral standards and to discover Christian values basic to wholesome personal growth and spiritual fulfillment.

  • Belmont University offers academically challenging undergraduate and graduate programs emphasizing knowledge, fundamental intellectual skills, cultural perspectives, conceptual frameworks, and habits of ethical reflection and action in an interdependent world. All learning contexts stress the skills and dispositions necessary for lifelong learning that sustains the value of higher education in each person’s professional and personal life.

  • Belmont University welcomes students from diverse backgrounds and upholds the dignity of all. The university fosters an atmosphere of respect for the civil expression of divergent perspectives that enables students to learn, to live, to work, and to play together.

  • Belmont University students are challenged to engage and transform the world locally and globally. Viewing higher education as a transformative experience, Belmont prepares its graduates to take civic responsibilities seriously, to consider innovative solutions to problems, and to bring the best of themselves, their creativity, their intellectual skills, and their faith to meet the challenges and opportunities that face the human community.

Vision Statement

To be a premier teaching university bringing together the best of liberal arts and professional education in a Christian community of learning and service


Values

As a community seeking to uphold Christian standards of morality and ethics, Belmont University holds high ideals and expectations of each person who chooses to join the community. In upholding these ideals, Belmont proclaims these values:

* mutual respect and collaboration
* the worth of the individual
* personal integrity
* critical, independent thinking
* self control
* community responsibility and accountability

Values serve as guiding principles that shape our daily actions. They are truths that we believe are very important. Everyone needs to know and understand the values of our organization. A relentless focus on these core values helps us move toward our vision.

Values help us remember what our organization will honor and appreciate. We will honor open, honest conversation even if the feedback we receive is not what we would like to hear. We will respect everyone we work with at Belmont regardless of their primary task or title. We will listen and learn from everyone in the organization so that we can all grow and contribute more. These three values are rules we can live by.

Values only become real when they are embraced by everyone in the organization. Our values of honesty, respect for others, and listening and learning from everyone are noble and yet difficult values to consistently live out. Leadership has the responsibility for setting the example here.

These ideas, hopefully, offer direction, security, stability, and most importantly, an opportunity to see how everyone can contribute and make a difference through their work at Belmont.