Slippery Rock University MSCHE 2011 Self-Study
Chapter One
Chapter One: Slippery Rock University as a Premier Public Residential University
Slippery Rock University has worked to identify, build upon, and strengthen its unique role within the firmament of American higher education since 1983, when the formulation of Pennsylvania State System of Higher Education (PASSHE) resulted in Slippery Rock State College’s reconstitution as a university. The University’s fundamental mission, as articulated in 1987, is “to provide high quality undergraduate and graduate instruction” as a masters-level comprehensive university. Scholarly research, promotion of professional performance, and meeting the “education-related economic, health, environmental, social, cultural, and Figure 1.1 recreational needs” of the region served are complementary missions (Figure 1.1). Slightly more Our Mission (Reaffirmed 2007) The fundamental mission of Slippery Rock University is than a decade after gaining university status, in to provide high quality undergraduate and graduate December, 1998, the university stated a vision that academic instruction. Complementary missions are to conduct scholarly research, to promote professional would drive and guide the fulfillment of our mission: performance, and to address the educationally-related “Slippery Rock University will excel as a caring economic, health, environmental, social, cultural, and recreational needs of the region served by the community of lifelong learners connecting with the university. In accomplishing these missions, Slippery world.” Standard 1 – A, D, E, and F Rock University primarily focuses its efforts on the academic areas of: • the arts and sciences, • business, • communication, • computer and information sciences, • environmental sciences and studies, • health and human services, and • teacher education.
The university community had a mission and a vision but, as our Middle States self-study came to a conclusion in the spring of 2001, we found ourselves still in a state of transition, still not quite connecting institutional history and traditions to a newly acquired status as a public comprehensive university. We had goals and aspirations; we had generations of institutional experience and a set of evolved practices. How might the latter be put in service to the former? What were we as an institution of higher learning and how might that grounded identity serve as the foundation for what we could be? Standard 1 - J Slippery Rock University’s beginnings in 1889 are similar to those of our fellow institutions within the state system: state normal schools charged with training the elementary and secondary teachers to staff Pennsylvania’s public schools. When, in 1926, the institution began granting four-year 16 | P a g e