The Norlin Charge to the Graduating Students

CU Boulder held the first commencement ceremony for six graduating students on June 8, 1882, in the chapel of Old Main. Since then, the university has awarded more than 300,000 degrees. 

President George Norlin first read the charge to the June 1935 graduating class. 

Now, all University of Colorado graduating students listen to the same charge at every commencement ceremony to remind them of their connected past and encourage them to look toward the future. The Norlin Charge is a favorite tradition of our Forever Buffs.

You are now certified to the world at large as alumni of the university. She is your kindly mother and you her cherished sons and daughters.

This exercise denotes not your severance from her, but your union with her. Commencement does not mean, as many wrongly think, the breaking of ties and the beginning of life apart. Rather, it marks your initiation in the fullest sense into the fellowship of the university, as bearers of her torch, as centers of her influence, as promoters of her spirit.

The university is not the campus, not the buildings on the campus, not the faculties, not the students of any one time—not one of these or all of them. The university consists of all who come into and go forth from her halls, who are touched by her influence and who carry on her spirit. Wherever you go, the university goes with you. Wherever you are at work, there is the university at work.

What the university purposes to be, what it must always strive to be, is represented on its seal, which is stamped on your diplomas—a lamp in the hands of youth. If its light shines not in you and from you, how great is its darkness! But if it shines in you today, and in the thousands before you, who can measure its power?

With hope and faith, I welcome you into the fellowship. I bid you farewell only in the sense that I pray you may fare well. You go forth but not from us. We remain but not severed from you. God go with you and be with you and us.