Mission and Core Values

The American University of Paris offers a student-centered, intellectually demanding, and career-enabling learning experience in a dynamic European capital. Here, curious and courageous thinkers embrace disciplinary and cultural diversity. Together, we develop creative approaches to enduring questions and contemporary global challenges. Engagement with Paris and an exceptionally international community shapes our research, learning, and campus life. 

How We Do This

The University achieves its mission by offering students programs of study that combine liberal arts inquiry with preparation for professional life. Whether pursuing majors in social or natural sciences, humanities, arts, or pre-professional and applied disciplines, students benefit from the dynamic and engaging teaching of a world-class faculty in small classroom settings. AUP students engage with a wide range of intellectual ideas and cultural perspectives in our campus community, and are offered opportunities to explore those ideas and perspectives through direct experience of Paris, the rest of France, and beyond. AUP’s integrated learning model blends classroom learning and its practical applications, preparing students to reflect and apply, to analyze and act. In these ways, an AUP education supports professional skill development and cultural fluency; the very global engagement and the capacity to negotiate difference that emerge from the distinctive diversity of AUP’s students, faculty, and staff. AUP students forge lifelong connections to one another and to the University. Upon graduation, they continue to benefit from the global network as part of the alumni community. 

• The American University of Paris commits to the highest standards of academic rigor and integrity, and to academic freedom.
• The American University of Paris commits to an academic culture of engagement, global citizenship, and community that fosters in students and faculty a critical sense of commitment to and responsibility for a world of interdependence. 
• The American University of Paris commits to a multilingual, multicultural learning environment where students develop a capacity for ethical and political judgment that is alert to all forms of diversity. 
• The American University of Paris commits to bringing out the best in all community members, inspiring them to excellence and equipping them to live actively and compassionately to create a just and sustainable world.   
• The American University of Paris commits to maintaining the exceptional space of the AUP classroom, where a diverse body of students and faculty meet to articulate civic values and negotiate difference, as together they question, reflect upon, and work toward creative solutions to real-world problems.

At The American University of Paris, we understand that a successful community is grounded in shared values and that ethics are rooted in our practices and communications. These require the development of skills, compassion and curiosity, as well as a willingness to tolerate the discomfort and uncertainty that encounters with different points of view generate. Given the inherent diversity of cultural, social and gender backgrounds at AUP—a diversity we expect only to grow in complexity— it is foundational to our vision and essential for the community-building we prioritize that we all learn and practice mutual respect and effective communicative relationships. The goal is always to speak in ways that invite others to listen and listen in ways that invite others to speak—to reach mutual understanding, even and especially when we cannot come to agreement.

A healthy community can only be sustained in an environment conducive to growth and evolution. Given the severity of the current climate crisis, AUP will work to increase support for environmental efforts on campus, to further develop an understanding of sustainability through our curriculum, and to effect ongoing progress for AUP and the world’s future.