Mission and Credo of Claremont Graduate University
The mission of Claremont Graduate University is to prepare a diverse group of outstanding individuals to assume leadership roles in the worldwide community through research, teaching, and practice in selected fields.
Superb instruction, innovative research, and practical experience are the keys to an excellent graduate education. Educational institutions have an obligation to become civically engaged in order to enrich and to better society. Institutions of higher education must be ethically vigilant, consciously exploring normative and moral issues. Knowledge consists of more than facts and has more than merely utilitarian ends; knowledge pursues and reflects values. Education is immeasurably enriched by the experience and insight of those outside the educational community. Human diversity is indispensable for improving the quality and texture of the education experience. Ongoing education is a lifelong responsibility of the global community’s leaders.
Advanced education is essential for the well-being and future of an increasingly complex society. Claremont Graduate University is an independent institution, striking in its global linkages and partnerships, innovative in the ways it teaches, characterized by continuous reconfiguration, responsive in its research to social issues and needs, and sensitive to aesthetic and moral dimensions of professional life.
Commitment to Diversity
In its educational programs, its admissions and financial aid policies, and its faculty and staff hiring practices, Claremont Graduate University is strongly committed to creating and nurturing an environment that is characterized by diversity. In student selection and in all of its activities and programs, CGU functions without regard to race, creed, color, gender, sexual orientation, national origin, age, or disability. CGU is pleased to welcome a wide variety of students to its programs, including recent college graduates, young professionals, and mid- and late-career men and women who wish to advance further in their current occupations or to change fields.
This diversity of experiences, interests, backgrounds, and aspirations allows a diversity of perspectives that enlivens classroom interaction throughout all CGU programs.
The Nature of the Graduate University
Comprehensive, independent, devoted entirely to graduate study, and a member of The Claremont Colleges consortium, Claremont Graduate University is unlike any graduate-level institution in the nation.
Founded as The Claremont Graduate School in 1925, CGU has achieved a reputation for excellence in the arts, education, the humanities, religion, the social sciences, management, mathematics, public health, and information systems. Today, CGU’s approximately 2,000 full-time and part-time students are enrolled in degree programs in 24 different fields. Most of these programs lead to the PhD Degree.
Although relatively small in size, CGU enjoys the benefits of a larger university. Through its partnership in The Claremont Colleges consortium, Claremont Graduate University manages to achieve the best of two worlds that are often considered mutually exclusive: intimate-scale education, and the facilities and academic breadth of a much larger institution. The Claremont Colleges consortium, a unique concept in American higher education, includes CGU and nationally known undergraduate institutions—Claremont McKenna College, Harvey Mudd College, Pitzer College, Pomona College, and Scripps College—and the Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences.
Each of the seven institutions has its own student body, faculty, administration, campus, and curricular emphasis, style, and mission. Yet, they are on contiguous campuses in the pleasant Southern California community of Claremont, and they cooperate to provide university-scale services and facilities, including a two million-volume library system, health and counseling centers, ethnic centers, an interfaith chaplaincy, and a performing arts complex. In addition, the Claremont School of Theology and the Rancho Santa Ana Botanic Garden are affiliated with the Graduate University.
Because many of the faculty members from the undergraduate colleges and affiliated institutions participate actively in the Graduate University’s programs, CGU students benefit from potential access to a faculty of far greater breadth than any other 2,000-student institution could offer.
Transdisciplinary Study
Students at CGU are encouraged to pursue academic interests and research agendas that cross established boundaries between individual programs and disciplines. Graduate education at CGU features both the disciplinary training and specialization appropriate to the master’s or doctoral degree, as well as opportunities for course work and research that transcend disciplinary perspectives. There are five ways that students can pursue a transdisciplinary path at CGU.
- Students, with the approval of their advisors, may select courses and work with faculty outside of their specific school or department.
- Students may pursue dual degree programs, simultaneously completing two degrees in different schools or departments.
- Students may also propose interfield degree programs that combine two disciplinary fields in one degree.
- Transdisciplinary courses are open to all CGU students. In 2004, the CGU faculty voted to require all doctoral students to take at least one transdisciplinary course as part of their degree requirements (see the description in the “Doctor of Philosophy Degree” section in this Bulletin).
- The Transdisciplinary Studies Program provides research grant funding to transdisciplinary student teams, and presents up to five transdisciplinary dissertation awards annually to PhD candidates.
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