If we forego the urge to answer immediately "Of course!" and instead ask what might be entailed in being a learning-centered institution, we may engage in useful self-reflection. We may in that process reaffirm our institutional commitment to our central purpose--our learning mission, our essential functions--teaching, learning, scholarship and service, and our identity--how we see ourselves and how we might advantageously represent ourselves to others.

The question, and the consequent answers, may also be viewed as a response to several issues. We often are accused by outsiders of being "faculty-centered." In its extreme form, this criticism portrays us as operating the university for our convenience, inattentive to teaching--particularly undergraduates, and graduating poorly educated students. More recently, we hear advocacy for a purported antidote to this self-centeredness, a call for more "student-centered" institutions.

Carried to its extreme, this becomes a form of consumerism.  If we endorse a learning-centered approach to these issues, we establish a goal that transcends the interests of any constituency and a focus that defines our respective and shared responsibilities.