Seattle Pacific University will be a place that graduates people of competence and character equipped to change the world.

What kind of graduates will change the world? To start with, they will have to be highly competent, disciplined, having mastered an area of study yet still capable of thinking out of the box. They must be smart, savvy, innovative. They must be curious and eager learners, long after their formal education ends.

But competence without character is a deeply flawed goal of education. The sociologist James Davison Hunter says that "character matters … because without it, trust, justice, freedom, community, and stability are probably impossible." But frighteningly, Hunter goes on to say, "character is dead" in our culture, "its time has passed." Our educational institutions no longer teach it, because our culture can no longer decide what it is.

We believe character formation does indeed take place during the college years. And so we had better be intentional about it. This is not easy work, because the culture does not always support sorting out right from wrong, serving the common good, attention to the poor, deep respect for others, seeing the big picture. We commit to this work, waning in so many circles, because we believe only graduates of this sort will ultimately make the world a better place.