Vision, Mission and Core Values
Vision
To be a leading research and learning hub for addressing social, cultural, political, and economic issues through multidisciplinary, critical, and innovative approaches.
Mission
The Mission of SESS is to:
- Nurture an open academic community with a shared culture of intellectual curiosity and scholarly rigor which serves society at large through the production of contextually situated knowledge and research on issues of local and global relevance
- Enable the intellectual empowerment of students, within and outside the classroom, to confront pressing social challenges as engaged citizens, through critical thinking and considerate engagement with issues of social justice and the varied forms of inequality in society today
- Foster an intellectual environment which is cantered on collaboration, diversity, empathy, and respect for all, and which encourages transformative teaching, learning and research
- Provide a holistic and rigorous education to prepare students for a productive life of intellectual curiosity, cultural appreciation, and an understanding of the variety of disciplinary approaches across the humanities and social sciences
Core Values
One of the fundamental questions that push many institutions of higher learning and research to critically reflect upon, is their role in shaping the moral and ethical basis of societies they claim to serve and how to play that role effectively. Places like the School of Economics and Social Sciences (SESS), with its two wings Department of Economics and Department of Social Sciences and Liberal Arts also need to seriously think of its contribution toward the moral and ethical making of its students and the wider society. The programs and faculty envision turning their students into citizens who are empowered to think critically and act responsibly when embarking on the journey of practical life. Creating an environment that facilitates this is often a challenge. One way to achieve this goal is to develop a set of core values that inspire and inform the faculty, students, and administration; such that these are considered, called upon and adhered to in all facets of life on campus including but not limited to procedures, practices, curriculum, teaching, assessments, research and communications.
Drawing on the above insights this document proposes the following set of five core values and defines these in the context of School of Economics and Social Sciences. These core values demand our collective commitment. This means that students, faculty, administration, and staff practice these values in everyday academic life at the school and frequently refer to these to inform and improve ethical decision-making capacities and behavior.
Integrity
Definition and Rationale: Integrity includes the connotations of all strong moral principles such as the upholding of Truth, Honesty, Fairness, Equality, Sense of accountability and Transparency. To have integrity means to be in a state of being whole and undivided. It implies that individuals try to have a consistent ethical system that is not only integrated within all spheres of their personal choice and decision making but also integrated with their knowledge, learning, and doing which should allow them to live out a value-guided life. To combine the traits of honesty, fairness and equality in one’s thought and action, it will be a prerequisite to have advanced critical-moral reasoning whereby one can see the effects of one’s right and wrong decisions and actions and thereby chooses and acts with extreme caution so as not to breach the requirements of honesty, fairness, trustworthiness and accountability at any level.
Pledge Statement: At SESS, everyone will try to be honest, impartial, and just in all their academic and non-academic dealings whether teaching, research, administration or societal engagement. There should be honest teaching and exchange of all relevant ideas without personal biases toward any specific school, religion or philosophy, serving the goal of academic integrity and academic responsibility, giving credits to others’ intellectual labor and borrowed ideas. Our graduates and faculty should be ones with moral courage to seek truth above all interests, make sacrifices for upholding truth and justice at all levels, and becoming agents of much needed reform in our local and global world. An effective environment will be created to encourage and reward honesty and the practice of higher ethics which require moral courage and sacrifice of personal interests. Dishonesty, unfairness, and unethical conduct will be severely discouraged not only through appropriate penalties as permitted in institutional policies but also through a culture of common dislike.
Respect
Definition and rationale: Respect, closely related to compassion and empathy, means considering someone or something worthy of high regard and is both an individual and collective responsibility. Self-respect safeguards one’s own core values when tackling challenges and respect for others brings flexibility to engage with a diverse set of individuals, opinions, ideas, and possibilities. Seen this way, respect serves as the touchstone for numerous other values such as courage, diversity, and academic freedom. Respect together with academic freedom, diversity and courage allows one to acknowledge the sound and well-reasoned argument in an academic discourse, even if it means adjusting one’s own position. In this way, they serve the collective search and implementation of universal truth, justice, and goodness.
Pledge Statement: SESS faculty, students, administrators, and staff practice active listening while accepting that others’ ideas, and opinions are worthy of attention, are empathetic when choosing words or taking actions, seek open communication, and are willing to respect personal differences. Each member of the faculty, students, administration, and staff hold oneself accountable for their actions, have courage to respectfully engage with others in difficult conversations, know, respect, and follow institutional rules and conduct codes.
Excellence
Definition and Rationale: Beyond academic excellence, the goal is the maximum development of one’s intellectual capacities, creativity, and innovative skills in service to common good. This excellence should be visible not only in the higher quality of teaching and research but also purposeful learning whereby learning translates into action both within the campus and in the larger social sphere. That is how intellectual and moral excellence combine to create self-excellence and collective good.
Pledge Statement: Faculty will try to live by the values they teach and become ethical models for the students to emulate. At the same time, they will nurture excellence in the classrooms through raising engagement and through mentorship. Everyone will hold themselves to high standards of academic performance and personal conduct. Achieving excellence will allow members of the IBA community to improve their surrounding physical, social and natural environment.
Fairness
Definition and rationale: Fairness implies the lack of favoritism toward one side or another based on but not limited to religion, gender, culture, ethnicity or economic background. According to International Center for Academic Integrity (ICAI), impartial, consistent, and just responses to dishonesty and integrity breaches are fundamental to educational fairness. Fairness creates predictability, transparency, and clear and reasonable expectations. Fairness bestows all members of the academic community the right to expect fair treatment while also obligates them to treat others fairly.
Pledge Statement: At SESS everyone gets a fair and impartial treatment and is subject to clear and just set of rules and consistently applied policies. It is an academic community where faculty, students, administration, and staff engage with others equitably, communicate expectations clearly, respond to dishonesty consistently and uphold academic integrity unfailingly.
Diversity and Academic Freedom
Definition and Rationale: Both diversity and academic freedom though mentioned as separate values, are in fact the direct outcomes of values such as Integrity, Respect and Fairness and should be ensured without compromising the core values such as ethically and culturally appropriate conduct. Academic freedom is also another form of diversity as it gives space to differences of opinion without any threat of professional disadvantage.
Pledge Statement: SESS community pledges to respect and accommodate diversity of people and ideas, creating a sense of security that allows our community members to pursue their intellectual interests and pursuit without any apprehension of being directly or indirectly penalized by university authorities in any form including unnecessary interference and professional disadvantage.