Mission and Core Values

Mission Statement

Chartered as a liberal arts college in 1962, The American University of Paris is today an urban, independent, international university located at the meeting point of France, Europe, and the world. The University provides a student-centered, academically-rigorous, career-enabling, and transformative learning experience to the global explorers who are its Bachelor’s and Master’s students, empowering them to cross both disciplinary and cultural borders with ease in order to assume their places as responsible actors and leaders in over 140 countries worldwide.

AUP’s mission is to educate its graduates to communicate effectively in a world of many languages; to read well, listen carefully, and write intelligently in a voice of their own; to become critical thinkers about history and human societies, economics, culture, literature, the arts, science, politics, psychology, business, and communication; to develop creative interdisciplinary solutions to contemporary global challenges; to be digitally literate in a world of swift-paced change; to understand the ethical imperatives of living in such a world; and to move across contemporary cultural borders with a sense of commitment to and responsibility for a world held in common.

The University achieves its mission by providing its students with a curriculum combining liberal arts inquiry, preparation for professional life, and student-centered, active learning in small classroom settings; dynamic, engaged teaching informed by both disciplinary and interdisciplinary faculty scholarship; a host of opportunities for direct experience of the world and its many cultures; a wealth of intellectual exchanges on campus at conferences of global reach; and an integrated learning model that marries classroom learning and its application to real-world contexts, preparing students to master and to make, to reflect and to apply, to analyze and to act. In these ways, an AUP education supports professional skills development and cultural fluency—the sense of global engagement and the capacity to negotiate difference that emerge from the natural diversity of AUP’s student and faculty bodies. Upon graduation, AUP students take part in and benefit from the global network that is our worldwide alumni community, creating lifelong connections to one another and to the University.

Core Values

  • The American University of Paris commits to the highest standards of academic rigor and integrity, and to academic freedom.
  • The American University of Paris commits to an academic culture of engagement, global citizenship, and community that fosters in students and faculty a critical sense of commitment to and responsibility for a world of interdependence. 
  • The American University of Paris commits to a multilingual, multicultural learning environment where students develop a capacity for ethical and political judgment that is alert to all forms of diversity. 
  • The American University of Paris commits to bringing out the best in all community members, inspiring them to excellence and equipping them to live actively and compassionately to create a just and sustainable world.   
  • The American University of Paris commits to maintaining the exceptional space of the AUP classroom, where a diverse body of students and faculty meet to articulate civic values and negotiate difference, as together they question, reflect upon, and work toward creative solutions to real-world problems.