The ecology of the university depends on a deep and abiding understanding that inquiry, investigation and discovery are the heart of the enterprise, whether in funded research projects or in undergraduate classrooms or graduate apprenticeships. Everyone at a university should be a discoverer, a learner. That shared mission binds together all that happens on a campus. The teaching responsibility of the university is to make all its students participants in the mission. Those students must undergird their engagement in research with the strong “general” education that creates a unity with their peers, their professors, and the rest of society.

The Boyer Commission on Educating Undergraduates in the Research University, Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Bulletin for America’s Research Universities, 1998, 9.