At the Fall 2024 workshop, BYU Continuing Education (BYU CE) announced its new mission, vision, and values.
When Richard Houseman began his time as Dean, BYU Continuing Education’s mission, vision, and values were at the forefront of his mind. Even President Reese observed that he brought “a keen sense of mission to this position." Dean Houseman found that the existing BYU CE mission accurately described our goals but employees seemed to have difficulty remembering it due to its length. At the time, other BYU organizations were revising their missions, and external reviewers suggested that BYU CE do the same.
After prayerfully pondering the issue, he decided to move forward with an update: “I wanted something that was short and inspiring, that people could remember,” he says. “Something that could really help bring BYU Continuing Education together [and] help define what we do in a way that people could remember and identify.”
To create a mission, vision, and values that would become an integral part of the BYU CE community, Dean Houseman gathered a team of CE colleagues and asked them to consider three questions:
- We seek to do what with whom?
- What is our long-term purpose?
- What are our unchangeable values?
Guided by these questions, the team spent hours drafting ideas, deliberating, and drafting again. Committee members talked with the full spectrum of BYU CE employees, sharing ideas and getting feedback. This feedback was the main influence on the new mission.
“The real stakeholders were the members of BYU CE,” says Dean Houseman. “If we can have this experience engage everyone, it's not just ‘Dean Houseman announces this phrase that everybody now learns,’ but everybody has input.” The process of creating the mission is an example of the inter-department unity that the new mission aims to create.
Other big influences were BYU’s core values and vision. President Reese highlighted these in his inaugural address, which focused on remembering prophetic promises:
Our task, I submit, is to claim in our day the prophecies of the past. Our task is to become the university that prophets have foretold—to become the world’s “greatest institution of learning” and “the fully anointed university of the Lord about which so much has been spoken in the past.”
Later in his address, President Reese posed a key question, for all to ponder: “Is the mission of BYU changing me, or am I trying to change the mission of BYU?”
BYU’s mission, rooted in prophetic declarations, can change students. This understanding was central to the new BYU CE mission, vision, and values. A simple description of CE’s goals wasn’t enough; the mission needed to be unforgettable and encourage members of the BYU CE family to become better.
President Reese said, “Each student’s eternal progression must remain our foremost concern. To this end we strive for every student to have an inspiring-learning experience.” So, the new BYU CE mission would need to bring together the spiritual and academic as one and the same.
This duality is present throughout BYU CE’s mission, vision, and values. Words such as inspiring and enlightening are as spiritually evocative as they are academically descriptive, and the BYU CE goal of benefitting “the world” may refer to the geographic Earth, the secular world, or both.
After much deliberation, BYU CE landed on a final mission statement: Inspiring Lifelong Learning to Benefit the World.
The kind of lifelong growth that BYU CE intends to offer is rooted in understanding and remembering who we are and where we’ve come from. BYU CE aims to enlighten “by way of remembrance,” as did Peter in the New Testament. As we remember the BYU CE mission, vision, and values, they will shape who we are and enable us to become more, both academically and spiritually.
"They don't feel like it's just words on a page,” Dean Houseman reflects. “Employees here … are remembering the vision, mission and values, and letting it guide them.”
The effect of BYU CE’s new mission, vision, and values is clear. Employees are already internalizing these inspired objectives. With this newfound unity and remembrance, BYU Continuing Education is poised to impact more people for good than ever before.
