Mission and Vision

Mission

The University of Houston-Downtown is a community of diverse faculty, staff, students, and regional partners dedicated to nurturing talent, generating knowledge, and driving socioeconomic mobility for a just and sustainable future.

This new Mission Statement shows that UHD is an institution that is driven by public purposes, and it clearly addresses the university’s role in serving the needs of the region and the city.

As we approach our 50^th anniversary, we continue to stay true to our first purpose, which is to educate our students. As a student-ready institution, we boost student success by being prepared for the students whom we recruit and enroll. Our students become members of an academic community that identifies where their potential lies and acts to nurture their innate talents. With the reputation of being an engine of students’ socioeconomic mobility, the university equips students to serve a common good rather than seeing their degrees solely as a private gain.

Our commitment to generating socially impactful knowledge through thoughtful inquiry is manifested by our marked ability to bring the expertise of our students, faculty, and staff together with that of community partners to explore and exchange ideas and to search for solutions to seemingly intractable problems.

We are also committed to engagement with and outreach to the city and region, and we encourage our students through experiential and applied learning to consider the implications of public service and collaborative problem-solving as they bend to work toward a just and sustainable future.

Vision

The University of Houston-Downtown will be an inclusive university of choice for Houstonians seeking to contribute to the social, intellectual, and cultural lives of their communities.

Our vision is forward-looking and reveals the new paradigm that will establish the culture of UHD for the next 20 years. The vision to make UHD a university of choice will require dedication from the university’s community. Promoting institutional and inclusive excellence and engraining them as practices in every area of the university will get us to this point.

However, in addition to our internal efforts, we will need the support of external partners. We invite existing and future collaborators to join us in effecting organizational and operational changes so that we can indeed become a model public, urban university.