LOOKING BACK, LOOKING FORWARD

Remarks by Kathryn Mohrman
President of Colorado College
at the college convocation celebrating the
125th anniversary of its charter
February 9, 1999 — Shove Chapel
 

Welcome to this, the 125^th anniversary celebration of the charter of Colorado College.

We meet in a year flush with "millennium talk," from confidence over the end of the Cold War to anxiety about the apocalypse. I have been thinking about the future as well — the future of Colorado College.

I ask you to think about this campus, not in the year 1999 but in 2024 when we will be celebrating our 150^th anniversary. So move forward with me in time and imagine that it is 25 years from today, and that we are looking back at the accomplishments of the college since 1999.

Welcome, then, to the 150^th anniversary celebration of Colorado College in February 2024.

I speak today about a college with a consistent vision for 150 years.

I speak today about a college that has prospered by blending its commitment to tradition with its willingness to embrace innovation.

I speak today about a college committed to the same set of core values for its entire history.

What are these continuing values? Colorado College has been dedicated to excellence in the liberal arts and sciences since its founding in 1874. The faculty has been focused on instilling curiosity, wonder, and intellectual excitement in the young women and men who come here to study. The college has implemented these values by the power of small classes, personal interaction, and academic rigor.

These values were re-affirmed in the early years of the 21^st century through wide-ranging campus discussions of mission and priorities. Faculty, staff, students, alumni, and trustees made commitments that have carried us forward to our 150^th anniversary. These deliberations were comparable to the self-examination that occurred in the 1960s and led to the creation of the Block Plan.

This college took a courageous step in the early years of the 21^st century. CC determined to pursue its own definition of success rather than follow the trends that were sweeping other campuses. At a time when many students seemed most concerned with the narrow vocational purposes of higher education, Colorado College renewed its dedication to the enduring questions of liberal learning as the best way to prepare undergraduates for lifetimes of professional, civic, and personal satisfaction.

The fundamental purpose of this college over the past 150 years has been to provide transformative experiences for its students. Two decades ago our predecessors committed themselves to five agendas, all focused on making a profound difference in students’ lives.

• First, the college community re-dedicated itselfto the proposition that the quality of teaching, learning, and discovery depended upon the quality of the people who came here.
• Second, the college pledged itselfto focus on students’ intellectual attributes as well as on subject matter.
• Third, the college announced its determination to build upon the beauty and distinctiveness of its location.
• Fourth, the college redoubled its commitment to understanding human societies in all their complexity and richness, both in the curriculum and in co-curricular activities.
• Finally, faculty and students have challenged themselves to work at the intersections of traditional bodies of knowledge.

We are here today, at our 150^th anniversary in 2024, to celebrate the success of Colorado College in realizing these commitments to structure a powerful educational experience in the liberal arts and sciences.

The college community re-dedicated itself to the proposition that the quality of teaching, learning, and discovery depended upon the quality of the people who came here.

 

Colorado College has sought the very best among students, faculty, and staff, and has looked in particular for individuals who have believed in the values to which the college is committed. Moreover, not only have we recruited the best, but we have also supported and encouraged them to do their best, whether they worked in the classroom, in our facilities, in the financial aid office, or on the athletic field. The success of the college is a testament to the extraordinary individuals who have come here.

In our recruitment of students, we have selected individuals who not only possessed records of outstandingacademic achievement, but who exhibited the imagination to make the most of what is here. We have admitted those students who would make a difference in the intellectual life of the campus, both in and outside theclassroom. We have sought intellectually engaged students—students who would get the most from small classes, field study, and participatory learning. We have looked for creative students, requiring of applicants that they present evidence of original effort in order to be admitted. Finally, we have soughtstudents with the potential to make a difference in the world, for our goal has been an alumni body who would contribute to their families, their professions, and their communities.

The interactions among these high quality individuals have created the transformative power of a Colorado College education.

 

For the past quarter century, this college has enhanced its commitment to students’ intellectual attributes, as well as to subject matter.

For 150 years, Colorado College has been dedicated to conversation and inquiry as the heart of a liberal education. Early in the 21^st century, the campus adopted a series of initiatives to enhance these attributes in the broad intellectual development of its students. Indeed, these programs are so deeply imbedded in the life of the campus that it is hard to imagine the college without them.

Our first-year program emphasizes high standards, intellectual engagement, and a focus on the fundamental purposes of the liberal arts and sciences. Our Pathways Curriculum offers entering students a set of choices for beginning their four years here. Whatever the topic, all pathways emphasize the habits of mind we believe are central — curiosity, imagination, analytical thinking, and effective expression. For several decades now, we have explicitly engaged students from the very first day in activities that exemplify what we stand for as a liberal arts college.

In addition, for the past quarter century, we have required all students to complete an original creative project. We have built this expectation into every academic major, and we have made mentoring these independent projects one of our most important teaching responsibilities.

Recently I joined a group of students who were discussing their projects:

Melinda Schultz will interview women entrepreneurs in India as the basis for her thesis.

Juan Gomez will collaborate with a faculty member on a research project studying brain chemistry related to behavior.

Jeffrey Smith will make a film about three poets in Argentina.

Susan Wong is creating a new organization on campus to assist students to improve their research abilities.

Abdul Ibraham is engaged in a project combining theoretical study and social action to fight children’s poverty in Colorado Springs.

Cecelia Roanhorse will direct a play written by current students in cooperation with a visiting Pulitzer Prize winner.

Although Colorado College has always had students like these, todayin 2024, every student is deeply engaged in an original project. As a consequence, on our 150^th birthday, a Colorado College education is one of unparalleledintensity, rigor, creativity, engagement, and joy.
 

Our third important value has been our determination to build upon the beauty and distinctiveness of living in Colorado.

 

Our location is a source of our self-identity. We have long been one of the nation’s most highly rated liberal arts colleges. Our Western location has freed us to pursue our own path to excellence, to emphasize individual opportunity, to link ourselves to our community, and to take advantage of this stunning location.

Both students and faculty have long used the surrounding region as a living laboratory in many disciplines. Today, at our 150^th anniversary, we are more engaged than ever before in using the natural and social world to enhance classroom study with hands-on learning. In 2024, students, faculty, and ideas flow regularly between the campus and the region around us.

We think about our location in a second way as well. While community service has long been part of our tradition, today we are particularly focused on improving education of the next generation. For more than a decade the college has been committed to Millenium Elementary School in one of the poorest parts of the city — with undergraduates as tutors, MAT students as teachers, and faculty, staff and alumni as volunteers. The influence of Colorado College in the K-12 educational program in this city is enormous.

Our curriculum, our co-curricular experiences, our community involvement all reflect our Rocky Mountain roots. I am very pleased we are a national college offering "the liberal arts with an altitude."

 

Fourth, we have expanded our commitment to understanding human societies in all their complexity and richness.

Colorado College has become nationally recognized for its innovative approach to the study of cultures. Indeed, we expect all students not only to understand their own society — that’s a given — but to develop proficiency in a second language and to immerse themselves in a culture different from their own.

Our priority on the study of cultures has both intrinsic and extrinsic motivations — intrinsic because questions of human society have long been central to the liberal arts and extrinsic because interaction with other cultures is part of our everyday life in the 21^st century.

On campus, we expect all students to examine issues that cut across traditional boundaries — such issues as authoritarianism and democracy, the family, the role of borders and migrations, ethnic conflict, the individual and the state, religion, and assimilation and identity. These themes apply equally to locales from Denver to Dakar, Kansas City to Kyoto. What is most innovative about our approach is that we have united various kinds of study that in the past had been located in different and often antagonistic parts of the curriculum. While many students and faculty are interested in a particular part of the world, or an aspect of American ethnicity, they have come together around common questions of what it means to be human.

These courses are complemented by immersion in other cultures. Students are challenged to integrate theory and practice through study, reflection, and direct experience. These "before and after" courses integrate off-campus experience into students’ total educational program.

Finally, the curriculum is enhanced by campus life. In our 150^th year, 31 percent of entering students come from ethnic, religious, and social backgrounds different from the white Protestant heritage of the college. Another 10 percent are citizens of the world who have chosen this college committed to broad human understanding.

What difference does it make? The discourse on campus is enriched by examining issues from multiple points of view, by testing hypotheses against other perspectives, by encouraging analytical thought and mutual respect. As a result, Colorado College serves the needs of a society reliant on citizens who can live together and strengthen our nation’s democratic institutions.
 

5. Finally, faculty and students have challenged themselves to work on the intellectual cutting edge, at the intersections of traditional bodies of knowledge.

For more than a quarter century, Colorado College has emphasized interdisciplinary learning in the liberal arts and sciences. Today, we do so with even greater confidence than before, as the boundaries of traditional disciplines have become increasingly porous and indeterminate.

Students have gained in several ways. First, they see the contributions of their studies to serious problems facing our society and world. Let me give some recent examples:

One class looked at works of literature and art that have inspired social change in their societies.

Another group of students is engaged in a series of independent study projects on the philosophy and ethics of artificial intelligence.

Other students interested in environmental policy have examined the ways in which legislative action supports or hinders the work of citizen organizations.

In such courses, students learn that knowledge is connected in often unexpected ways. Such academic experiences reinforce the intellectual attributes that we believe are fundamental to a liberal arts education—critical thinking, close analysis, problem identification and problem solving. The level of sophistication that such courses require has a profound impact on the intellectual environment here.

Colorado College alumni report that their experiences in interdisciplinary studies have served them well. They have learned to work collaboratively. Most importantly, they see the complexity of issues, avoiding the trap of thinking that there is a simple solution.

Faculty also benefit enormously from interdisciplinary work. At a small college, most professors are one-of-a-kind — the only medieval historian, the only printmaker, the only high-energy physicist. Through collaborations across boundaries, they have created a lively intellectual community that brings these seemingly distant specializations in closer cooperation. It’s a form of faculty development that encourages risk-taking and promotes intellectual growth.

I often describe the structure of the faculty in 2024 as a matrix — with the historic 19^th century disciplines on one axis and these 21^st century interdisciplinary programs on the other. Faculty members find themselves at different places on this matrix throughout their lives — as they find new partners for scholarly work, as they create new courses, as they supervise senior projects that challenge them to learn along with their students.

Let me give just one example of what this has meant. Almost 30 years ago, a group of faculty members in the arts and humanities developed a new vision of interdisciplinary study in the arts. They placed themselves and their students at the intersections of the traditional disciplines of music, drama, art history, philosophy, film study, and so on. The curriculum they developed has inspired thousands of students over the last quarter century with the power of creative experience.

The spirit of this curriculum is embedded in the physical design of our arts center, a building that has won awards for architectural distinction and has attracted many visitors to our campus. The structure itself has embodied the college’s distinctive sense of identity.

This example of the arts could be repeated in many other areas of the curriculum. I use it, however, because it brings me back to my original theme — Colorado College as a place of transformative education in the liberal arts and sciences.

At the 100^th anniversary of the college in 1974, President Lew Worner used a quotation from historian Henry Steele Commager, a quotation that captures what has happened at Colorado College:

The task of lifting — indeed of ennobling — the intellectual level of the college community….is a process that involves not only student, teacher, and administrator, but the whole community, the community of the past as well as of the present—and a sobering awareness of the community of the future. For education is not merely something that goes on inside a classroom or a laboratory or even a library….  It is…the creation of an atmosphere favorable to learning, an atmosphere that stimulates the imagination, excites the curiosity, enlarges and enriches the horizons.

Commager could not have imagined how well he was predicting the future of Colorado College. Our predecessors made a commitment to enhancing the transformative power of this community of learning. They structured the college’s programs to emphasize intense academic engagement, creativity, cultural understanding, intellectual flexibility, and a sense of place. These values are part of our tradition as a liberal arts college — and also part of our future.
 

Let us now return to 1999. This 125^th anniversary convocation is an occasion for looking backward — to celebrate all who have come before us to build this wonderful college. It is also an occasion for looking forward — to anticipate the transformation in the lives of thousands of young men and women in the decades ahead.

I am eager to attend the 150^th birthday of Colorado College in 2024. I hope the president then will recite amazing accomplishments in this wonderful community of learning. And I hope those accomplishments are even more inspiring than the future we have imagined together today.
 

(Also available online, Chaplain Bruce Coriell's 125th Convocation Benediction)
 
 

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