Office of the Chancellor > Speeches, Columns and Letters > Investing in your future

Investing in your future
(This editorial originally appeared in the Colorado Daily on May 7, 2008.)

Our students have completed finals and 5,488 of them are preparing to graduate Friday at Folsom Field. It is a special time of year and this graduating class is a particularly special group.

Members of the graduating class of 2008 enrolled at the University of Colorado at Boulder at a time when the university was under intense scrutiny and during their stay with us they have experienced some difficult times.

By choosing CU these graduates demonstrated a confidence in us and we now have the pleasure of rewarding that confidence with degrees that have increased in value and that, we hope, will help to transform their careers and indeed, their lives.

The Class of 2008 is symbolic of how far we have come. These students were choosing between CU and other schools when the university was facing several well-publicized challenges. They arrived on campus when the flagship was listing and today things have never looked brighter. Yet they couldn't have known how well things would turn out.

Today, we are experiencing unparalleled success on many fronts. This past year we have achieved all-time highs in freshman applications, diversity, fundraising and federal research revenues. Our last two freshman classes have been among the largest, best qualified and most diverse in our history.

Friday we will confer 4,293 bachelor's, 792 master's, 242 doctoral and 161 law degrees in 30 different disciplines. We will graduate 460 students with honors and 201 students will receive dual degrees. We are proud that their CU education has prepared them for careers and contributions in the global workplace of the 21st century. But beyond the numbers, members of the Class of 2008 have a special place in my heart because they had confidence in CU – they knew things would get better.

Here are just a few examples.

We have four new buildings funded in part by a student-led plan that mandated additional student fees to subsidize critically needed buildings during a state funding crisis. These four "green" buildings ¾ ATLAS (Alliance for Technology, Learning and Society), Wolf Law, Koelbel Business and the new Visual Arts Complex ¾ will forever be the legacy of the students of this era and will be there for their younger siblings, their children and their grandchildren.

This is a group of students who helped to establish an ethos of community service and civic engagement. CU was one of only three universities in the nation this year to receive the Presidential Award for General Community Service out of 530 colleges and universities that competed for this award. Nearly 14,000 students devoted more than 360,000 hours of community service in 2007 alone. We are redefining CU-Boulder as a place where scholarship, social consciousness and civic engagement are the norm among our students.

Together we moved forward in supporting a sustainable planet. CU was a founding signatory of the President's Climate Commitment, promising last June to bolster our already substantial efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Now, more than 500 universities have signed the pledge. With this commitment and others, this group of students steadfastly upheld CU's legacy of leadership in sustainability.

This is the first era of students to live by a student-developed Honor Code throughout its CU career and one that helped to entrench the Colorado Creed, a voluntary code of conduct that promotes principles such as action, honor, integrity and accountability as an ethical anchor of the undergraduate experience at CU-Boulder. They were here as we re-invested in diversity as a core value, hiring our first Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity and Community Engagement as a member of the senior leadership team to ensure that diversity is always at the table in all of our decision making.

They were a part of the process as we integrated athletics into the campus culture. Today even a casual visitor to our campus can see a new spirit manifested in everything from the gold Spirit T-shirts worn by thousands of our student-fans on game day, to warm feelings of appreciation when a professor or staff member gets a note of congratulations from someone in the Athletic Department. The Athletic Department's community outreach continues and Coach Dan Hawkins said it all when he told children at Sierra West Elementary School in Pueblo West last week that today, "We stand for a lot more than wins and losses."

Since this special class of students and the university have persevered together to find remarkable success, it's only appropriate that our commencement speaker Friday is the definition of success. Jeanne P. Jackson, a 1974 CU-Boulder graduate in finance, has been recognized among Fortune Magazine's "50 Most Powerful Women in American Business" and is one of "America's Most Influential Women," according to Vanity Fair magazine. It's befitting that a person of such accomplishment was chosen to speak by this year's Senior Class Council.

Whether it's the business world or the world of higher learning, when people invest in an organization during tough times, that investment has special meaning. The investment by the members of the Class of 2008 and their parents is not lost on us. It was their commitment and confidence in CU that helped raise us to the level we enjoy today, and we hope the payoff for them will be in the eternal value of their CU degree.

G.P. "Bud" Peterson is the 10th Chancellor of the University of Colorado at Boulder.