Fairfield University, founded by the Society of Jesus, is a coeducational institution of higher learning whose primary objectives are to develop the creative intellectual potential of its students and to foster in them ethical and religious values, and a sense of social responsibility. Jesuit education, which began in 1547, is committed today to the service of faith, of which the promotion of justice is an absolute requirement.
Fairfield is Catholic in both tradition and spirit. It celebrates the God-given dignity of every human person. As a Catholic university, it welcomes those of all beliefs and traditions who share its concerns for scholarship, justice, truth, and freedom, and it values the diversity that their membership brings to the University community.
Fairfield educates its students through a variety of scholarly and professional disciplines. All of its schools share a liberal and humanistic perspective, and a commitment to excellence. Fairfield encourages a respect for all the disciplines - their similarities, their differences, and their interrelationships. In particular, in its undergraduate schools, it provides all students with a broadly based general education curriculum with a special emphasis on the traditional humanities as a complement to the more specialized preparation in disciplines and professions provided by the major programs. Fairfield is also committed to the needs of society for liberally educated professionals. It meets the needs of its students to assume positions in this society through its undergraduate and graduate professional schools and programs.
A Fairfield education is a liberal education, characterized by its breadth and depth. It offers opportunities for individual and common reflection, and it provides training in such essential human skills as analysis, synthesis, and communication. The liberally educated person is able to assimilate and organize facts, to evaluate knowledge, to identify issues, to use appropriate methods of reasoning, and to convey conclusions persuasively in written and spoken word. Equally essential to liberal education is the development of the aesthetic dimension of human nature, the power to imagine, to intuit, to create, and to appreciate. In its fullest sense, liberal education initiates students at a mature level into their culture, its past, its present, and its future.
Fairfield recognizes that learning is a lifelong process and sees the education that it provides as a foundation upon which its students may continue to build within their chosen areas of scholarly study or professional development. It also seeks to foster in its students a continuing intellectual curiosity and a desire for self-education that will extend to the broad range of areas to which they have been introduced in their studies.
As a community of scholars, Fairfield gladly joins in the broader task of expanding human knowledge and deepening human understanding, and to this end it encourages and supports the scholarly research and artistic production of its faculty and students.
Fairfield has a further obligation to the wider community of which it is a part, to share with its neighbors its resources and its special expertise for the betterment of the community as a whole. Faculty and students are encouraged to participate in the larger community through service and academic activities. But most of all, Fairfield serves the wider community by educating its students to be socially aware and morally responsible people.
Fairfield University values each of its students as an individual with unique abilities and potentials, and it respects the personal and academic freedom of its members. At the same time, it seeks to develop a greater sense of community within itself, a sense that all of its members belong to and are involved in the University, sharing common goals and a common commitment to truth and justice, and manifesting in their lives the common concern for others which is the obligation of all educated, mature human beings.