Since it was founded in 1972, George Mason University has grown into a major educational force and earned a reputation as an innovative, entrepreneurial institution. Just minutes from Washington, D.C., George Mason has a growing and diverse student body and an exceptional faculty of enterprising scholars. At the center of the world's political, information, and communications networks, George Mason is the university needed by a region and a world driven by new social, economic, and technological realities.

Strong alliances with businesses, the community, and government benefit George Mason’s students and the larger society. Enrollment is nearly 30,000, with students studying in 148 degree programs at the undergraduate, master’s, doctoral, and professional levels in Arlington, Fairfax, Loudoun, and Prince William Counties.

George Mason University will be an institution of international academic reputation providing superior education enabling students to develop critical, analytical, and imaginative thinking and to make well-founded ethical decisions. The university will respond to the call for interdisciplinary research and teaching not simply by adding programs, but by rethinking the traditional structure of the academy.

The university will prepare students to address the complex issues facing them in society and to discover meaning in their own lives. George Mason will encourage diversity in its student body and will meet the needs of students by providing undergraduate, graduate, and professional courses of study that are interdisciplinary and innovative. The university will energetically seek ways to interact with and serve the needs of the student body.

The university will nurture and support a faculty that is diverse, innovative, and excellent in teaching, active in pure and applied research, and responsive to the needs of students and the community. The faculty will embody the university's interactive approach to change both in the academy and in the world.

The university will be a resource of the commonwealth of Virginia serving private and public sectors and will be an intellectual and cultural nexus between Northern Virginia, the nation, and the world.

George Mason will be the university needed by a region and world driven by new social, economic, and technological realities.

We are in the right place: The nation's capital region is the epicenter of the world's political web, its information and communications network, and its new ecomomy.

We are ready: In an age that demands originality and imagination, George Mason is the region's most innovative university. George Mason will

• become a magnet for outstanding faculty who will devise new ways to approach problems, invent new ways to teach, and develop new knowledge for the benefit of the region and nation;
• attract inventive, industrious students of all ages and cultures and produce citizens who are intellectually and technologically literate-people who will lead by the force of their ideas;
• transform into knowledge and wisdon the vast amounts of information now accessible through new technologies;
• build strong alliances that bring the know-how of business and the community into the university and take the knowledge of the university into the workplace and the larger society;
• become a center of inquiry, knowledge, and professional expertise in fields with vital implications for human needs and opportunities in the future; and
• remain innovative, resourceful, and responsive, while drawing on the intellectual and cultural heritage of the classical university.

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