Santa Clara University

Mission Statement

Santa Clara University aspires to create a learning and service community which promotes competence, conscience, and compassion among students, faculty, and staff.  Embedded within these goals is a mandate to pursue scholarly understanding and constructive engagement with the world.  As the principal University-wide organization focusing on international, intercultural, and global subjects, International Programs provides a variety of academic settings and learning opportunities around the world.   Academically the approach is both interdisciplinary and multi-disciplinary and recognizes that learning takes places in the classroom, in the field, in the community, and in service to others. International Programs appreciates that intercultural competence and knowledge of the global environment should not be limited to the Humanities or Social Sciences, but is relevant to Business, Engineering, and the Natural Sciences as well.  While International Programs’ mission is informed by a variety of disciplines and viewpoints, it is inspired by the challenge offered by martyred Salvadorian Jesuit Ignacio Ellacuria:

We, as an intellectual community, must analyze causes; use imagination and creativity together to discover remedies; communicate to our public a consciousness that inspires the freedom of self determination; educate professionals with a conscience, who will be immediate instruments of transformation; and continually hone an educational institution that is academically excellent and ethically oriented.