CCORE was officially created as the Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on Minority Affairs in the summer of 1987 when Chancellor James Corbridge, Jr. appointed a group of faculty members and campus administrators to serve on a committee to act as a sounding board for campus minority issues that arose throughout the year. The committee would also advise him on policies related to minority faculty, staff and students. The committee’s charge was to develop plans of action in the areas of minority faculty and staff recruitment and retention, minority student recruitment and retention, the development of greater cultural awareness through the curriculum, and the nurturing of a campus environment characterized by the appreciated of cultural values and diversity. Three subcommittees (faculty/staff recruitment, student recruitment, and curriculum development) returned in 1988 with twenty recommendations which lead in part to the implementation of the Cultural & Gender Diversity requirement in Arts and Sciences.
While the committee has had some lasting success over the years in advancing issues related to underrepresented populations on campus, there are concerns that the details of prior committee accomplishments might be lost to time and we hope not to duplicate efforts when commitments to act may have already been put in place. To address these issues, CCORE has charged itself with developing an historical archive in an effort to preserve the successes of the committee as well as attempting to maintain a record of the ongoing challenges relating to goals yet to be met and campus initiatives where ongoing support is needed. To this end, the committee has met with the Office of Diversity, Equity, and Community Engagement created as a full-time office in March 1998, who has assumed some of the projects/responsibilities originally assigned to CACMA and the University of Colorado Student Government (CUSG), who had begun to undertake a similar effort in tracking student activist movement.
More recently, CUSG made significant progress toward a building an archival website to which CCORE will link, and held a launch party in April 2013. CCORE has also recently met with ODECE in order begin work on organizing scanning notebooks and other related historical documents in support of the project. While the CCORE History Project is still a work in progress, the idea has been adopted by the Chancellor Advisor Committees Chairs with the hope that all chancellor’s committees also work toward producing a record or their histories as well.
