Gustavus Adolphus College is a church-related, residential liberal arts college firmly rooted in its Swedish and Lutheran heritage.
The College offers students of high aspiration and promise a liberal arts education of recognized excellence provided by faculty who embody the highest standards of teaching and scholarship. The Gustavus curriculum is designed to bring students to mastery of a particular area of study within a general framework that is both interdisciplinary and international in perspective.
The College strives to balance educational tradition with innovation and to foster the development of values as an integral part of intellectual growth. It seeks to promote the open exchange of ideas and the independent pursuit of learning.
The College aspires to be a community of persons from diverse backgrounds who respect and affirm the dignity of all people. It is a community where a mature understanding of the Christian faith and lives of service are nurtured and students are encouraged to work toward a just and peaceful world.
The purpose of a Gustavus education is to help its students attain their full potential as persons, to develop in them a capacity and passion for lifelong learning, and to prepare them for fulfilling lives of leadership and service in society.
Implicit in this statement of institutional purpose and goals are certain institutional values that guide the Gustavus community. These values are rooted in our distinctive heritage and help to define our community. They also help us to focus on appropriate objectives for our college, guide the selection of priorities among those objectives, and help to shape the strategies we will pursue in the face of various challenges and opportunities.
First among our shared values is a commitment to high quality, even to excellence, in all that we do. In the words of Eric Norelius, founder of the College, "Whatever we do, let us do it well." Given our other values, it should be clear that this commitment to excellence is neither a code word for elitism nor a rejection of the best in Gustavus' heritage. Indeed, our distinctive heritage demands nothing less than excellence.
Gustavus has always prized community and has been marked by a pervasive sense of concern for every member of the College community. Civility, mutual respect, cooperation, shared governance, and caring have long been hallmarks of the College. Freedom to express a broad range of ideas is central to our sense of community, and resolution of conflicts in the broader society has long been a fundamental concern for us.
The Swedish and biblical heritage of Gustavus, its specifically Lutheran roots and bonds, have ensured that justice and fairness are primary institutional values. The College strives to be a just community in all of its actions and to educate its students for morally responsible lives. Relations within the College community are guided by high moral principles, and persons graduating from Gustavus are expected to understand the full moral implications of their actions. "Education for the common good" would well describe what we strive for, and integrity must be one of our defining characteristics.
The College highly values service as an objective of life and of education. We embrace the biblical notion that true leadership expresses itself in service to others, and affirm the classical ideal of a liberating education, an education that frees one to serve God and humanity to the best of one's ability.
The conviction that religious faith enriches and completes learning, is the bedrock of community, ethics, and service, and compels one to excellence in a divinely ordered world informs our whole enterprise. Without expecting conformity to a specific religious tradition, we encourage an honest exploration of religious faith and seek to foster a mature understanding of Christian perspectives on life.
While there are undoubtedly additional values that distinguish Gustavus from other institutions and that guide and define us, these five values are certainly pervasive within and foundational for the College community.
The music wing of Schaefer Fine Arts Center contains 35 practice rooms available for student use, all of which contain Steinway grand or baby grand pianos or Steinway Boston pianos.
