President's Page
A Future as Distinctive as Our Past

he 1990s have been a decade of tremendous advancements at Colorado College. With an endowment well over $300 million, a strong applicant pool, excellent faculty and staff, loyal alumni and friends, a beautiful campus, and an innovative curriculum, Colorado College is the strongest it has ever been. It would be easy to sit back and become self-congratulatory. Instead, we continue to challenge ourselves as we have for the past 125 years.

Quality enhancements on a campus as diverse at this one are the sum of many initiatives. Let me describe for you just some of the activities in the last few years that have made the past decade so exciting at Colorado College.

Intellectual vitality

When I think about the high quality of CC, I think first of the enduring values of liberal learning as the best way to prepare young women and men for lifetimes of professional, civic, and personal satisfaction.

This past spring, the faculty approved an exciting new program for entering students beginning in the fall of 2000. Entitled First-Year Experience, this combination of curricular and co-curricular activities will enroll all entering students in two-block courses organized around a common theme. These courses will be linked to New Student Orientation (which has improved in recent years), and have better advising from both faculty and peer mentors, new residence hall initiatives, and social programming designed to reinforce the academic mission of the college. Details about this innovative program will be featured in future issues of the alumni magazine.

The faculty approved a foreign language requirement as well, which also goes into effect next fall. The purpose of this new competency requirement is to prepare students for an increasingly global environment through exposure to other cultures and languages. There will be a half-dozen ways for students to complete it, from traditional courses or study abroad to high-level high school preparation or personal experience. We believe this new requirement is a statement of our academic values.

The last few years have also seen a substantial increase in student research and creative work. Read about Ralph Bertrand, associate professor of biology, and his team of student researchers in this issue of the Bulletin. Because CC students are so creative, we have also increased the funds for venture grants, student presentations at conferences, and projects to enhance campus diversity.

One of the hallmarks of CC students is the breadth of their intellectual interests. Since 1994, students have had the formal opportunity to enroll in double majors, thus allowing them to combine often disparate academic passions. Among the students who graduated in May 1999, 24 had double majors. During this decade we have also established interdisciplinary majors in environmental science, Asian studies, women's studies and others, allowing both students and faculty to work together at the intersections of traditional bodies of knowledge.

Committed faculty and staff

These innovations in the educational program are possible only because of the quality of the people here on campus. Through the generosity of alumni and friends of the college, we have added six new endowed professorships to recognize current distinguished faculty members. We have also judiciously increased the size of the faculty and administration to meet new needs in subjects as diverse as Chinese, sociology, physics, and women's studies, as well as staff functions in technology, facilities, library, development, and student life. Our students are the beneficiaries.

Since 1996 we have supported faculty through the Crown-Tapper Teaching and Learning Center. Through consultants, guest speakers, and experienced professors already on campus, the TLC has engaged more than 75 percent of the faculty in discussions of teaching improvement.

Our academic excellence has been recognized by grants from such organizations as the Henry Luce Foundation for a professor in Asian art history; the National Science Foundation for science teacher training, the Sherman-Fairchild Foundation for environmental sciences; the National Endowment for the Humanities for a humanities professorship; El Pomar Foundation for the Russell T. Tutt science building; and the Christian A. Johnson Endeavor Foundation for international education. Our single largest donor this decade -- the Packard Foundation -- has supported the arts and our strategic planning efforts.

Excellent students

Committed faculty and administrators are most effective with talented students. We are delighted at the quality of young men and women who are choosing to attend Colorado College. We are especially pleased with the increase in numbers of Boettcher Scholars from Colorado and the establishment of other named scholarship programs to support excellent students. Within the past two years, through the creativity and foresight of the board of trustees, we have created new trustee merit scholarships to encourage the best and the brightest to attend CC.

At the same time we have improved our financial aid programs to reduce loan obligations for first-generation, low-income, high-ability students. This past year we made four-year commitments of financial aid to all incoming students, replacing the year-by-year system we followed in the past. We hope this change will make it possible for students and their families to plan ways to make Colorado College affordable.

Top-notch facilities

On the drawing boards today is the Tutt Science Building, a cutting-edge home for geology, psychology, and environmental sciences that will be built just north of Barnes Science Building. Also in the works is the Cornerstone Arts Center, to be built on the southeast corner of Cascade and Cache La Poudre. This facility will take an exciting new interdisciplinary vision for the arts and translate that philosophy into physical space; it will also provide a new home and a new theater for the drama department.

One distinctive feature of a liberal arts college is the extent to which students learn from one another as well as from faculty. We put a great deal of emphasis, therefore, on residential life. At the start of the decade, we substantially renovated Slocum, Mathias, and Loomis Halls. Today we are constructing the Western Ridge complex to provide apartment and theme house options for an additional 288 students, bringing our on-campus residency to 80 percent of the student body. The student organization quadrangle on the east campus (between Nevada and Weber) is the new home of our sororities, fraternities, the Student Cultural Center, and the Autrey athletics field.

The campus master plan includes more than buildings. We are also investing in an effective infrastructure. We have improved our heating and cooling systems, ending our reliance on dangerous CFCs; we have upgraded utilities to support increased demands. Our athletics facilities have been enhanced by a new track, a renovated swimming pool, and improved locker and training rooms. Our commitment to computing and technology has resulted in substantial improvements within classroom buildings, residence halls, and administrative offices. While machines will never replace professors, computing is now a way of life for almost everyone at the college.

Preparing for an intercultural future

We cannot predict the future with accuracy, but we can be sure that it will be more complex than it is today. One of the best ways to prepare students for this world is serious attention to the diversity of human societies. I am delighted that almost half of our students have a block (and usually more) of living and studying in another culture, from Nairobi to the Navajo reservation, from inner-city Chicago to Calcutta. There is no substitute for first-hand experience.

Many students learn about others right here in Colorado Springs. The Center for Community Service is now an integral part of life at CC. The majority of our students volunteer time and energy to help others through tutoring programs, senior citizen centers, environmental action, participation in a citywide affordable housing coalition, and at the Shove Chapel soup kitchen.

We created the Diversity Council this decade, a campus-wide body that advocates a climate of success for all members of the CC community. Our Riley Scholars program now brings three minority Ph.D. candidates to teach at CC for a year (and, we hope, interest them in a career at a liberal arts college). While the percentage of minority and international students is not where we want it to be, we are glad to see slow and steady progress.

Next time you visit campus, you will sense the excitement generated by these and many other initiatives underway that will make Colorado College an even better place for teaching and learning. And just as the Block Plan resulted from a process of deep self-examination, today's innovations are possible because we continue to engage in regular introspection. In the past five years, we have undertaken a major evaluation on the 25th anniversary of the Block Plan, a thorough self-study as part of our 10-year accreditation process, and external reviews of all academic departments and many administrative units.

In that spirit we are embarking this fall on a project, supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, to look at "best practices" at three comparable liberal arts colleges. Our goal is to share ideas and to learn from peers who are wrestling with the same questions we are. Our team will give special attention to issues regarding intellectual strength, interdisciplinary study, student-faculty collaborative work, and student recruitment and retention, especially of American ethnic minorities. This will not be a project of imitation, but one of serious self-examination of what we do and how we can do it better.

Colorado College is on the move, while remaining committed to its core values of the liberal arts and sciences. As we stated at our capital campaign kickoff events, "You ain't seen nothin' yet!"

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