Can’t help but find this amusing @Wesleyan97 castigates me, then suggests Wesleyan plagiarised his wording.
I find odd than none of you even refer to the original document; Wesleyan 2020 from May 2010, wherein just that wording; “boldness, rigor, and practical idealism” was included in the Mission statement! no less.
When I was researching colleges I read the 2020 document fully, before we visited or DS applied and was accepted, what piqued my interest and one that I continue to explore here was the following, extracted from section IV the Challenges section:-
For decades, Wesleyan has been regarded as one of the top liberal arts institutions focused on undergraduate education. Over the last twenty years, the US News and World Report rankings have had an important impact on the public’s sense of “the best” colleges in America. Wesleyan’s ranking has generally slipped, from 6th in the late 1980s to 13th in 2009. These rankings reflect a more fundamental shift in Wesleyan’s capacity to compete with other schools for faculty, students, and public recognition. While Wesleyan was the wealthiest school in relation to the number of students in the late 1960s and early 1970s, today the university does not have the ability to sustain the levels of spending per student that one finds at some of our peer institutions. This has an immediate negative impact on the rankings. With endowment increasingly taken as a way of measuring educational strength, Wesleyan has seen its standing erode. Prestige plays an important role in student choice, and reclaiming Wesleyan’s status at the very top will be challenging.
I still find this to be the case some 5 years on and nothing is being done to stop the erosion, whatever @circuitrider may say.