What We Believe

When we recruit potential Carleton students, faculty, and staff, we pay the most attention not to standardized test scores, but to a hunger to learn. We honor at Carleton academic achievement; but we honor more the passionate hunger to learn which lies behind and beyond such achievement.

We take our daily and our life’s missions seriously, but we are sufficiently aware of our own fallibility that we do not take ourselves overly seriously. Learning is what we are all about here, but we also know that learning alongside of our Carleton friends is fun. We admire and we embrace life to the full, and we know that among life’s saving graces is a self-deprecating sense of humor.

We are always aware of where we have been, of our proud history, of what we owe to those who came before us, and of what we owe to the College’s graduates. As former President Larry Gould once noted, from the moment each of us arrives on this campus and here in Northfield, and for the rest of our lives, we are a part of Carleton and Carleton is a part of us.

At Carleton we ask our students and ourselves: Is this the best we can do? This is a Carleton tradition. At Carleton, we set the loftiest of goals for our students knowing that our former students say that at Carleton they learned that they were capable of far more than they had thought possible.

This particular and defining set of characteristics represent something of why you have joined Carleton and something of why I joined Carleton. I invite you to discover all the College has to offer.

Robert A. Oden Jr.

Adapted from “What Makes Carleton Carleton,” inauguration speech delivered October 26, 2002. Read the full inauguration speech