Following a demonstration on March 8 by Forum members and the group known as Take Back Our Campus, the CU-Boulder leadership team has provided the official response below to the group's demands.
Dear Forum Members:
On behalf of Chancellor DiStefano and the leadership team of CU-Boulder, I want to thank you for your commitment and passion around the issues you articulated yesterday (Thursday, March 8, 2011) in your demonstration at the chancellor’s office. Please consider this an official response to your demands.
First, the university cannot arrive at any thoughtful or comprehensive solutions to problems as complex as the ones you outline in just 36 hours. Solutions to these important and complex issues require discussion, coalition building, sharing with communities who have a stake in their success, votes and/or approvals, and revenue streams where needed.
Second, we feel we have been on a productive course of permanent engagement with you and other students, faculty and staff on many of the 18 issues you’ve listed, and on a host of others. We are sorry that you don’t feel that way, but we have been impressed nonetheless by your commitment, focus and desire on each of these issues. We know your patience is wearing thin, but we respectfully remind you that long-standing challenges cannot be resolved overnight by administrative decrees. Justice, change, and transformation aren’t declared – they are cultivated – carefully and purposefully over time. Quite simply, we need more time on these important issues.
With this in mind, our counter-offer to you is to appoint a small group of 10 or so leaders from your movement to begin to work with us immediately. We believe this group should include representatives from CUSG beyond those who have joined the protest in order to represent the larger student voice on campus. We can begin, as early as next week, an accelerated, focused effort to transform as many of your demands as possible into realities, setting specific timelines of action on those things that are possible, and developing blueprints and roadmaps for other goals that are not yet on your list.
There are some things you ask for that are outside of our control and that fall under state law, CUSG control, or that require regent approval, but we would be happy to work with you to better understand these structures to enable you to create change within them. In doing all this, we pledge to you, as we have previously, to be good faith partners in this process.
Sincerely,
Philip P. DiStefano, chancellor and Russell Moore, Robert Boswell, Deb Coffin
Stein Sture, Jeff Lipton, Ric Porreca, Frances Draper, John Sleeman and Joey White