Trinity College is a community united in a quest for excellence in liberal arts education. Our paramount purpose is to foster critical thinking, free the mind of parochialism and prejudice, and prepare students to lead examined lives that are personally satisfying, civically responsible, and socially useful.

Four elements are central to the success of this quest:

• An outstanding and diverse faculty whose members excel in their dual vocation as teachers and scholars; bring to the classroom the vigor, insight, and enthusiasm of women and men actively engaged in intellectual inquiry; work closely with students in a relationship of mutual trust and respect; and share a vision of teaching as conversation, as face-to-face exchange linking professor and student in the search for knowledge and understanding.
  

• A rigorous curriculum that is firmly grounded in the traditional liberal disciplines, but also incorporates newer fields and interdisciplinary approaches; that maintains a creative tension between general education and specialized study in a major; and that takes imaginative advantage of the many educational resources inherent in Trinity's city location.

• A talented, strongly motivated, and diverse body of students who expect to be challenged to the limits of their abilities and are engaged with their subjects, their professors, and one another; who take increasing responsibility for shaping their education as they progress through the curriculum; and who recognize that becoming liberally educated entails a lifelong process of disciplined learning and discovery.

• An attractive, supportive, and secure campus community that provides students with abundant opportunities for interchange among themselves and with faculty; sustains a full array of cultural, recreational, social and volunteer activities; entrusts undergraduates to regulate their own affairs; and embodies the institution's conviction that students' experiences in the dormitories, dining halls, and extracurricular organizations, on the playing fields, and in the neighboring city are a powerful complement to the formal learning of the classroom, laboratory, and library.