A logical early step in creating conversation about OpenCourseWare on Dartmouth campus is to look to the school’s mission statement to see where it connects. I expected Dartmouth’s mission statement to include at least one statement about “educating its students and the world” or “broadly disseminating knowledge” or at least “advancing knowledge and research for the greater good worldwide.”
Here is Dartmouth’s mission statement (full text at the bottom of this post).
The closest passage that I could find was this:
“Dartmouth fosters lasting bonds among faculty, staff, and students, which encourage a culture of integrity, self-reliance, and collegiality and instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world.”
This comes close, but it’s disappointing in that the “the broader world” is tacked on at the very end, and doesn’t play a central role in the sentence which is actually about bonds among university affiliates. If you pick it apart (it seems to me that being picky and semantic is warranted for something as important and central as a mission statement) it says that the bonds which Dartmouth fosters “instill a sense of responsibility for each other and for the broader world” among the individual members of the college. In other words, the school does not specifically make a point of spreading knowledge throughout the world, but the individual members feel “responsible” for the world in a broad sense, which might include a responsibility to spread knowledge throughout the world. Even though this statement involves a global scope, it says nothing specific about education or dissemination of knowledge on a global scope.
There’s also this statement:
“Dartmouth faculty and student research contributes substantially to the expansion of human understanding.”
This is only useful if we can understand course materials as research, which is a stretch to say the least.
I thought this was weird, so I did some research. My friend at Yale suggested that I consult the Dartmouth faculty handbook. But as far as I can tell, it’s of no help. The mission statement listed within is just a longer version of the one mentioned above, and makes no additional mention of educating the broader world.
Though our missions statement is lacking in this department, President Kim’s rhetoric seems to easily support OpenCourseWare. His saying, “make the world’s problems your problems” easily applies if you think of the lack of access to educational resources worldwide as one of the world’s problems.
I undestand that our mission statement was last revised in 2006. I think that it would be beneficial to add another revision to include a phrase that explicitly gave a global scope to our school’s goal of education.
As a comparison, I looked up the mission statements for all of the universities in the Ivy League. Some make an explicit point about global knowledge dissemination, and some come close. I would argue that they all offer more support for something like OpenCourseWare, though for a couple (mostly just Harvard), that’s easily contestable.
