Touro College is an independent institution of higher and professional education under Jewish sponsorship, established to perpetuate and enrich the Jewish heritage, to support Jewish continuity, as well as to serve the general community in keeping with the Judaic commitment to intellectual inquiry and social justice.
The Jewish heritage embraces two fundamental components reflected in Hillel’s historic dictum, “If we are not for ourselves, who will be? If we are concerned only with ourselves, what are we?” This seminal teaching shapes the core values of the college, which are:
These core values and the dual components of the Jewish heritage—the concern for the particular and the universal—are reflected in Touro College’s mission, which is to strengthen Jewish life and perpetuate the Judaic tradition on the college campus, and to contribute to the building of a better society for all through educational opportunities.
Cognizant of national and international threats to Jewish continuity in the forms of assimilation, loss of affiliation, and anti-Semitism, the Board of Trustees of the college views the college’s mission as transcending the physical borders of its original locus. Touro College seeks to strengthen Jewish identity and normative societal values by offering education programs serving the Jewish and general populations in communities nationally and around the world.
Touro College’s mission commits the college to multiple constituencies. In adherence to the particularistic aspect of the mission, Touro offers undergraduate and graduate programs in Jewish studies and liberal arts and sciences serving the diverse components of the Jewish community. In consonance with the universalistic aspect of the mission, the college supports underserved members of the broader community with neighborhood-based undergraduate programs. As an institution serving the general community in all its diversity, Touro College offers professional and graduate programs in such areas as education, law, medicine, allied health sciences, and business. Throughout its various programs, Touro College emphasizes academic achievement and quality in the context of a supportive and caring environment.