Northeastern University is dedicated to providing a broad diversity of students with the benefits of an academic program of the highest quality. Northeastern?s basic mission as a large urban university founded on the cooperative model of education remains what is has always been: to provide individuals with the opportunity for upward mobility through excellence in education.

The university is committed to achieving excellence through high-quality instruction in a liberal/professional curriculum that values equally, knowledge for its own sake, knowledge as a means to success in the workplace and knowledge as a cornerstone of personal achievement and satisfaction.

By placing strong emphasis on professional education, the university will continue to encourage and provide the opportunity for students to obtain the specific information and skills required for a lifetime of productive work in society. By committing itself to the research and scholarly activities of its faculty, the university will continue to encourage and provide the opportunity for teachers to make contributions to the body of knowledge from which society draws to sustain progress. By building a physical campus with the facilities and amenities that are conducive and necessary to the educational enterprise, the university will continue to encourage and provide the opportunity for all its constituents — students, teachers, employees and neighbors — to weave the educational process into their daily lives.

Excellence in teaching is the quintessential goal of the university. The university must be assured that its offerings to both undergraduate and graduate students are rigorous, relevant and rewarding in order both to provide a solid structure for educational excellence and to attract and retain students. The university also remains committed to the search for knowledge through research as well as through scholarly and artistic undertakings.

The university believes that its educational mission can be achieved only if the student body is not limited by economic status, cultural or racial background, geographic origin, sex or age. The university is committed to finding, attracting and keeping the ablest high school graduates as well as those whose promise suggests they can benefit from a Northeastern education.

The role of the university is to challenge individuals to perform to the limits of their intellectual capacity and to assist them in doing so. The university intends to structure its programs to better accomplish this goal with a student body of widely varied academic talents, abilities and accomplishments.

Northeastern has a long history of servicing the education needs of the nontraditional student in its School of Professional and Continuing Studies and life-long learning programs. The university will continue its commitment to provide quality degree and nondegree programs for those people whose circumstances prevent them from following the standard undergraduate and graduate program of studies by offering excellent courses and programs outside the typical college time frame.

Cooperative education has been the keystone of Northeastern University?s uniqueness for three quarters of a century. As a greater and greater percentage of the nation?s population becomes a part of the work force, and as the technological revolution continues daily to change the nature of work, the university must rededicate itself to keeping pace with those changes. The cooperative plan provides the ideal vehicle for doing this, but the university must continue to explore new ways of adapting the cooperative model to a changing work place.

A new sense of place at Northeastern has resulted from marked improvements in the campus and from the dramatic development of Northeastern?s neighborhood over the past 10 years. The university is determined, over the next 10 years to make its campus even more accommodating for its students, its teachers and its employees. The university is committed to increasing the residential facilities for its students, to constructing a complex of academic and research buildings centered around a new library, to developing new performing arts, recreations and athletic facilities, and to providing more parking structures on the periphery of the campus. The university is also determined to maintain and strengthen its reputation as a friend to the city of Boston and a partner of the commonwealth of Massachusetts.

The university is committed to communicating to all its current and potential constituencies its dedication to excellence in teaching, in programs, in scholarship, in research, in facilities and in ambience. The most important constituencies for the fiscal stability of Northeastern as well as for its intellectual vitality, are prospective and current students. The blueprint for excellence set forth in this document attempts to put Northeastern University?s vision of itself into words.

• Department of Mathematics, Northeastern University