The Drury Connect Initiative

Every year, our Drury community reaches out to be engaged in nearly every aspect of business and community service in Springfield and Southwest Missouri. While many other universities focus on research, Drury prides itself as a community of scholars with a primary focus on teaching and on a commitment to liberal learning and community engagement.

Drury is well known and well respected in the Springfield community, but despite our extraordinary level of engagement with our host community, neither Drury’s mission nor its vision are fully understood by the people of Springfield and Southwest Missouri, nor is Drury’s local impact fully appreciated.

Drury can be of even greater value to Springfield and thereby do a better job fulfilling our mission if we engage local leadership in a dialogue about the extent of our currentengagement, communicate better the interconnectedness of Drury University with Springfield and the Greater Southwest Missouri area, and discuss how we can partner together to expand our contribution to our common future. It’s time for Drury to take a greater ownership of the community in which we operate, and for the civic and business leadership of Springfield to take ownership of DruryUniversity's success.

The vision for our program is to make Drury a place of greatness:

  • Where theory meets reality
  • Where academic rigor meets community engagement
  • Where teaching meets community awareness
  • Where learning meets doing
  • Where campus labs meet community projects
  • Where Drury's reputation expands from simply a small liberal arts university located in Springfield to an integral engine of Springfield's success
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Drury Connect is to be structured around a series of Advisory Councils in areas where we most obviously connect to the university and/or have the greatest potential for doing so in the service of advancing the university’s mission. After extensive discussions with a 21-member Drury Connect steering committee, two smaller working groups, and full formal presentations to meetings of the university staff, faculty and department chairs, eight initial focus areas were identified. These initial focus areas are:

  • Architecture
  • Business and Economic Development
  • Continuing Professional Studies
  • Education and Outreach
  • Environment
  • Fine and Performing Arts
  • Health Sciences
  • Campus Culture

These initial priorities represent, in our collective judgment, those areas that most obviously connect us to the community and in which we are best poised to move forward most quickly.

The benefits are immense, most notably being our ability to understand the needs of our community and to demonstrate how we are alreadyworking and can work in the future to meet and exceed the needs of the community. We want Drury to be judged on its ability to help make Springfield and the greater Ozarks region a better place for us all.

We are committed to producing students who will have learned how to be responsible community citizens not only in the classroom, but more importantly, in the reality laboratory represented by the greater Ozarks region. Every year, our Drury community reaches out to be engaged in nearly every aspect of business and community service in Springfield and Southwest Missouri. While many other universities focus on research, Drury prides itself as a community of scholars with a primary focus on teaching and on a commitment to liberal learning and community engagement.

Complete Drury Connect Initiative (PDF)