Before going on-site at a client school, ISM Consultants examine numerous documents to gain a thorough grounding in each institution’s approaches to governance, operations, and student programs. The school’s mission statement is a central component in this review. Once on-site, observations, conversations, survey interpretation, and interviews at times reveal discrepancies between the school’s published mission statement and its de facto statement. The de facto mission (or missions) comprise sets of principles or practices that have come to be observed at some levels or in some departments of the institution and that do not conform to the published statement. In some cases, ISM has found that there appears to be a different de facto mission for each academic division, for each academic department, and/or for each component of the cocurriculum. The published mission statement appears thereby to “wander” its way through the school, applied with one interpretation here, with another interpretation there, and with no attention to its very existence somewhere else.