Corporate mission statement is an essential statement to all stakeholders of the organization about its own purpose, its goals and the competitive advantage it offers to its customers. Another purpose of the mission is to create a so-called positive ethos. Universities represent a specific group of institutions from the perspective of defining missions and working with ethos. This paper identifies the elementary components of university missions that help build a positive ethos. The research is focused on the analysis of mission statements of all public and private universities operating in the Czech Republic. The results of this research show that there is a difference in the approach to defining missions between public and private universities (in terms of the inclusion of individual components that help building a positive ethos). KEY WORDS Content analysis, Ethos, Mission, Mission statement components JEL CLASSIFICATIONL26, L25, I23, I25.