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In Review

EVER BETTERMeliora Guides New Vision and Values Statement

Mission

Learn, Discover, Heal, Create— and Make the World Ever Better

Vision

The University of Rochester will continue to frame and solve the greatest challenges of the future.

We are a community in which all who work, teach, create, and provide care are welcome and respected, and where all can pursue and achieve their highest objectives for themselves, their communities, and the world.

Steeped in Rochester’s rich history of social justice and entrepreneurial spirit, we will always be an inclusive, equitable, sustainable, and responsive organization at every level.

Values

Meliora: We strive to be ever better, for everyone.

Equity: We commit to diversity, inclusion, and access.

Leadership: We take initiative and share responsibility for exemplifying excellence.

Integrity: We conduct ourselves with honesty, dedication, and fairness.

Openness: We embrace freedom of ideas, inquiry, and expression.

Respect: We value our differences, our environment, and our individual and collective contributions.

Accountability: We are each responsible for making our community ever better, through our actions, our words, and our dealings with others.

We will hold ourselves accountable to these values in the design of our programs, the development and delivery of our services, the evaluation of performance, and in the ways in which we interact as a community.

The principles of Meliora are expected to be even more prominent in the life and culture of the University, serving as the grounding idea for a new University statement of Vision and Values.

Approved by the University’s Board of Trustees in May, the new statement is designed to better clarify and communicate the University community’s shared goals and principles.

Building from the letters of the motto, the statement articulates and defines core principles that are important to the institution and its community. They include equity, leadership, integrity, openness, respect, and accountability.

The statement will become part of a set of defining ideas, including the mission statement, that represent how the University envisions itself and its aspirations.

Drafted by a committee of faculty, students, and staff this spring, the new statement is modeled on similar efforts undertaken by the Medical Center and the College to better articulate the values of those units.

The Medical Center has established “ICARE” as its guiding statement. The word is an acronym for the core principles of integrity, compassion, accountability, respect, and excellence. The College has adopted a program based on six key principles. Called the Communal Principles, they include fairness, freedom, honesty, inclusion, respect, and responsibility. Each year, the College highlights one of the six principles, focusing activities and other programming around the ideas embodied in that principle.

The University’s new statement will be used to guide ongoing work to review and revise University policies and procedures.

The statements will also anchor education and training around diversity, equity, and inclusion by tying them to commonly held values, with a goal of helping strengthen a culture of respect.