Office of the Chancellor > Speeches, Columns and Letters > Letter to the Campus Community: What We Have Accomplished

Letter to the Campus Community: What We Have Accomplished
May 11, 2007

Dear Members of the CU-Boulder Community,

As we bring the academic year to a close, it is helpful to review what we have accomplished and assess what we can do better. The past year has been one of renewed focus and excitement at the University of Colorado at Boulder. Throughout the campus community and in every area critical to our success, we are moving forward to create a better, more positive environment, one in which our students, faculty and staff can thrive and succeed. I would like to take this opportunity to share with you what I think are just a few of the highlights that showcase our future and provide a glimpse at some of our community"s achievements:

Challenging our students - This past fall, we enrolled CU-Boulder"s largest, most diverse and one of the most academically qualified freshman classes ever. As we near graduation, applications for the fall class are up more than twelve percent, as is both quality and diversity. This past November, our campus was honored by the Peace Corps for being only the sixth university nationwide to surpass 2,000 volunteers during the organization"s lifetime – an award that I believe is symbolic of our students" best values and descriptive of their true character: students who are aware, idealistic, and who posses a strong sense of social consciousness.

Strategic planning - Last fall, we initiated our strategic planning process, "Flagship 2030" and established a steering committee of nearly sixty faculty, students, staff, community members, alumni and friends of the university. The steering committee has reached out to involve more than 200 members of the university community who have engaged both our internal and external stakeholders in this process. The goal is to define the characteristics of a great national, comprehensive, research university in the year 2030, and more importantly, to identify what actions we must take to achieve these characteristics and what resources will be needed to guide the institution well into the 21st century. We will soon be compiling a preliminary report of the Flagship 2030 which will then be vetted thoroughly within our university community before a final version is presented to the Board of Regents next fall.

Communications - The importance of our flagship university to the state of Colorado and its future cannot be understated. It is vital that we clearly communicate that value to the citizens, the stakeholders and the many audiences in our state, in order to secure our future and theirs. With this in mind, we continue to focus on ensuring proactive and effective communication. We recently concluded two national searches that have yielded a pair of seasoned professionals to help our university implement a proactive, message-driven, and dynamic communications strategy, one that is well coordinated and strategically focused. This will bring together our marketing, branding, media relations, publications, web, internal communications and community relations efforts. In so doing, we are making an important investment in our future success—we have important stories to tell in the local, national and global media, and we must ensure that our messages are effectively distributed, to clearly communicate our values and the importance of the work so many of you are doing.

Investing in faculty - The heart and soul of any great university is its faculty. This past year, we continued to recognize the important contributions that our faculty make to the quality of the instruction and research at CU-Boulder. We need to ensure that we are able to attract, develop and retain the very highest quality faculty possible. This past year, in addition to working to fill 80 faculty vacancies, we created 25 new tenure-track lines with the required startup funds. This, coupled with our efforts to attract additional Endowed Chairs, means that we should have more than 110 new tenure-track faculty join us in the 2007-08 academic year. While still dependent upon the final actions of the legislature, as part of our ongoing efforts to strengthen our educational, scholarly and research activities, we are planning to add funds to support an additional 25-30 new tenure-track lines and startup in the coming year. Finally, this past year, we took significant steps to retain our best faculty and made significant progress towards salary parity with our peers in the Association of American Universities.

Intercollegiate athletics – Significant progress has been made in our efforts to incorporate the Department of Intercollegiate Athletics as an integral part of the University. As part of this process, Athletics is setting and maintaining new standards of accountability and advancing the values of our institution with enthusiasm and renewed credibility – this is embodied in the recent hiring of former Air Force and Denver Nuggets head coach, Jeff Bzdelik, as new the head coach of our men"s basketball team. Coach Bzdelik, like all of our coaches, fully supports the academic values and mission of the University of Colorado at Boulder, and we can look forward to all of our athletic programs representing the University in a positive and inspiring manner.

Commitment to diversity - I am pleased to note that we have worked closely with the President"s Blue Ribbon Commission, which has resulted in a number of new initiatives. One of these, our search for a new Vice Chancellor for Diversity, Equity & Community Engagement, is in the final stages. This position will oversee our diversity efforts and help us to reach our diverse communities, both within the university and statewide, to create a welcoming and diverse community that better reflects the diversity, in all of its forms, of our nation and our world. We are making significant progress on this goal and everywhere I look, I see a community engaged in dialogue, discussion and healthy debate about how we can better foster ethnic, gender, geographic and intellectual diversity on the Boulder campus. Best of all, we have balanced our commitment to diversity with our historic values of free speech and inclusion, and I see more progress on this issue on the immediate horizon.

Community engagement with the City of Boulder - We are working closely with the Boulder community and the City of Boulder on a number of issues of mutual interest and concern. Whether the issue is alcohol management, land-use, or environmental sustainability, we are working to strengthen existing relationships and build new ones, to enhance the level of cooperation. We have arranged for our students to serve on key city committees and to help represent the university and student interests with integrity and vision. I am pleased to count City Manager Frank Bruno as a trusted partner in all of these efforts and a good many more, and I believe we are entering a new era of possibilities and opportunities for this important relationship.

State and federal relations - I was delighted this past March to appear before the Joint Education Committee of the Colorado General Assembly to provide a summary of the issues facing the University of Colorado at Boulder. We received a warm reception and were asked a number of insightful questions about the future of higher education. I can tell you that our state lawmakers are keenly aware of the funding challenges that our university and the other universities across the state. While still in process, it appears that we will make significant progress with respect to the support we receive from the state. We have sown the seeds of a strong working relationship with lawmakers this session and I look forward to continuing to make the case for investment in the University of Colorado at Boulder with state and federal lawmakers whom I believe understand well, the value the University adds to our state and nation.

Interdisciplinary partnerships - While the foundation of any university is based on the quality of its educational programs, the international reputation of all truly great educational institutions is based upon the quality of its scholarship. This scholarship must be dedicated to the creation of new ideas, new knowledge and new technologies, creative works and on the dissemination of that knowledge, those technologies, and those creative works in appropriate forums. The technological and creative advances of the next century will be made at the interfaces between traditional disciplines and as a result, continued emphasis must be placed on the development of interdisciplinary research, entrepreneurialism, and the establishment of strong intellectual partnerships: partnerships between institutions, between disciplines, between our university and the community, and between our faculty and our students, that allow all to become involved in and experience the excitement of creative scholarship and leading edge research. We are engaging in new partnerships with area universities, government and industry to forge new alliances and greater achievements in areas such as geosciences, energy research and biotechnology. We are also working together to seek out additional state and federal funding and other resources to make Colorado the nation"s leader in these areas of growing importance to the state, the nation and the world. For example we recently joined our colleagues at Colorado State University, the Colorado School of Mines and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden in forming the Collaboratory, a joint research project for the development of new energy technologies. The Collaboratory is being heralded from the halls of state government, in the private sector and among our peers as having enormous potential for generating research dollars, new discoveries and most of all, new energy resources for our nation. Likewise, though we were not selected to host a supercomputer for environmental modeling that went to the University of Wyoming, we will nonetheless, be sharing access to the computer and partnering with UW in projects on computational science and atmospheric modeling. In other areas, we and our fellow institutions of higher education have joined forces in lobbying for funding at the state capitol and delivering a unified message on the need to invest in the state"s research universities as a strategy for economic growth in Colorado.

Fundraising - Our educational, research, and creative and artistic achievements continue to impress, energize and motivate the great minds on our campus and are making CU-Boulder a hub of activity that keeps us among the nation"s elite public research institutions. Much of this would not be possible without the generous support of our many constituencies, including alumni, private individuals, philanthropic foundations, and our partners in business and industry. Thanks to their collective support and the great work of the folks in the CU Foundation, our fundraising success has reached an all-time high. As of March 31, 2007, fundraising at CU-Boulder is at $31.5 million, 35% ahead of where it was at this same time last year and we will clearly surpass our goal of $35.6 million.

There is much more to report, but time and space are limited. I want to close by thanking each of you for your contributions. Every one of these achievements has its roots in the hard work and vision of you, the members of our community. The University of Colorado at Boulder is a special place, where our dreams are harnessed to become vibrant realities and where our faculty, staff and students set their sights ever upward. In an age in which higher education struggles to help students find purpose, at CU-Boulder, purpose is built into all that we do and all that we seek to become. I believe that, with time, we will only reach greater heights in all that we do.

As we journey toward that end together, let me thank you all for your hard work and idealism, and for welcoming Val and me, and allowing us to serve this unique and incomparable institution that is the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Sincerely,

G.P. "Bud" Peterson
Chancellor