Residential Education at Dartmouth
Informed
Informed students possess a core of knowledge derived from many sources. Self-aware, informed individuals understand the value of multiple perspectives in gaining a complete picture. The residential living experience favors engaging in significant, challenging issues as a way to hone intellectual and practical skills as well as personal learning and growth. Theories help explain phenomena, and the better informed individuals become, the more precise their abilities to link theory with practice.
Empowered
Mastery of a range of abilities and capacities empowers students as they maneuver in and shape a dynamic, complex residential and academic community. The intellectual and practical skills needed for personal and collective success are extensive and sophisticated.
Responsible
Empowered and informed students are also responsible. Through discussion, critical analysis, and introspection, they come to understand their roles in their community and in society at large and accept active participation. Open-minded, empathetic, responsible individuals understand how abstract values relate to decisions in their lives. Responsible individuals appreciate others, while also assuming accountability for themselves, their complex identities, and their conduct. By weaving moral reasoning into the social fabric of life and work, they help communities and society shape their ethical values, and then live and work by those values.
The Informed, Empowered, Responsible concept was derived from the 2002 national panel report Greater Expectations by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.