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Mission & Vision

Loyola University Maryland is a Jesuit, Catholic university committed to the educational and spiritual traditions of the Society of Jesus and to the ideals of liberal education and the development of the whole person. Accordingly, the University will inspire students to learn, lead, and serve in a diverse and changing world.

Loyola seeks to prepare students at both the undergraduate and graduate levels for lives of meaningful professional service and leadership. At Loyola, this means the curriculum is rigorous and faculty expectations are high. Students are challenged to understand the ethical dimensions of personal and professional life and to examine their own values, attitudes, and beliefs.

In addition to academic coursework, the Jesuit mission is supported through a variety of programs and events sponsored by various University departments.

 

Together We Rise

Loyola University Maryland's strategic plan, Together We Rise, will define the University as a preeminent university for student success. Loyola will continue to grow in transformational excellence while helping students lead with love and work for justice.

Explore our strategic plan

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Vision Statement

The education of men and women of compassion and competence, imbued with the desire to seek in all things the greater glory of God, represents the enduring aspiration of Loyola University Maryland. That ideal, first elucidated by St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus and namesake of our university, continues to guide Loyola as it strives to lead students, faculty, staff, alumni, and friends forward to the promise of an examined life of intellectual, social, and spiritual discernment.

In pursuing these goals, Loyola asserts a bold vision, which the University will attain by providing undergraduate students with a liberal education that transforms them, that ensures they place the highest value on the intellectual life, and that instills in them an understanding that leadership and service to the world are intimately connected. Likewise, Loyola will be a recognized leader in graduate education, offering programs which are responsive to the needs of the professional and academic communities it serves, inspiring its graduate students to leadership, and inculcating in them the knowledge that service to the larger world is a defining measure of their professional responsibilities fully understood.

In all of this, Loyola will remain ever mindful of the Jesuit precept that the aim of all education ultimately is the ennoblement of the human spirit.

Core Values

From the time of their founding nearly 500 years ago, the Jesuits have had a distinctive way of looking at life. The Ignatian worldview emphasizes openness and enthusiasm toward the whole of God’s richly diverse creation and for the human person as its crowning glory; hopefulness and pragmatism in seeking graced solutions to life’s challenges, tempered by realism and compassion about the reality of human weakness; sustained critical attention to motivations and choices based on the conviction that individuals, through the exercise of their freedom, exert a real influence on their world and one another; and commitment to a life of growing integrity and increasing service to God and to others.

As a Jesuit, Catholic university with a 165-year history, Loyola University Maryland adopts and adapts these characteristic emphases of the Ignatian heritage, and reflects them in its life and work by encouraging all of its constituents to cultivate and to live by certain core values.