Fall Convocation Address By President Kay Norton
September 7, 2007
Good afternoon. Welcome Mayor Selders, students, faculty, staff, alumni, friends, and especially the University of Northern Colorado class of 2011.
I am grateful to have you join me today in standing, quite literally, on historic ground.
It was here on June 13th, 1890—just over 117 years ago—that civic leaders, educators, and citizens from across the State of Colorado gathered to lay the cornerstone of our institution’s first building.
The citizens of Greeley had overcome long financial and political odds to take the institution from dream to reality. In the 14 months since Governor Job A. Cooper had signed the bill to create the State Normal School, they had assembled 40 acres of land, raised the $15,000 the city was expected to put toward the first building, and when the state failed to come through with its funding, quickly raised over $10,000 more.
As our founders celebrated their success at the cornerstone laying, they also laid out their intentions for this institution. Their vision was an educated citizenry.
Governor Cooper put it this way: “Universal education must be the foundation stone upon which we must build for the future. The school room must be the nursery and the citadel of intelligence, liberty, Americanism. It is the enlightened conscience and educated intelligence of the many that will ultimately crowd back all corruption and anarchy, and harmonize contending factions and dissipate the dangers that threaten our country. Upon this foundation stone laid today will rise an institution to prepare leaders in this great work.”
The stone was set in the northeast corner of the building, which eventually was named Cranford Hall and survived until 1972. The cornerstone remains near its original location, just beyond the trees behind us and to the north, and the vision of those who laid it is alive in every building on our campus.
Each of us is helping fulfill that historic vision—students who have come to the University of Northern Colorado to transform their lives through education; faculty who are their teachers, mentors and scholarly role models; alumni who leave this place to go and make a difference in the world; and the staff and friends without whose support this institution could not function.
Today, we celebrate these great traditions of our own and those of the academy so eloquently described by Dean Caldwell.
Earning a Northern Colorado degree is about more than books and knowledge. It is about nurturing the mind and the heart, seeing potential in the unknown, and preparing to give back to society. If you look at the array of professions—the lives—we prepare students for, many are public service oriented. Northern Colorado graduates don’t just make money; they make a difference. 
Just last week, the daughter of a 94-year-old member of the class of 1935 brought me a copy of her mother’s recently published book, “Every Child Can Learn.”
It’s a collection of essays about some of her most memorable pupils and begins with a letter from a former student. It reads: “I was elected to the Delta County School Board in November. I had been thinking of running for the School Board for many years and I finally did it.... I am going to have a lot to learn in order to do this job well! As I do my work on the School Board, no doubt I will be applying some of the things you taught me in first grade in 1955.”
That was the same year Marie Greenwood became the first African-American teacher to be assigned to an all-white school in the history of the Denver Public Schools. Every week, from the time she took the assignment until the following spring, the superintendent would check up on her by calling her principal, and every week her principal would report she was one of the school’s best teachers. Eventually, she writes: “The administration got the message that qualified, dedicated teachers come in all colors and can be accepted to teach in any school.”
It is impossible to know how many lives Marie Greenwood touched in 30 years as a first grade teacher, although we do know that Denver Public Schools named an elementary school in her honor in 2001. 
It is equally difficult to comprehend the effect our faculty members have on Northern Colorado graduates. The transformation of students’ lives has just begun by the time they walk across the stage at Commencement. The return on their investment in a university education is just beginning.
A university is very different from a business. In the short run, that can be a disadvantage because we don’t have the ready discipline of a bottom line. But it is interesting to note that the average life expectancy of a Fortune 500 company is only 40 to 50 years. Businesses don’t have the time or the mission to focus on the long term. A university, on the other hand, lives for centuries. As a public nonprofit institution of higher education, we have the luxury of focusing on the future of our students, the intellectual life of our faculty, and the health of our community. We still have to get things like efficiencies, tuition, program array and faculty salaries right in order to sustain the transformative power of what happens on our campus, but we can celebrate the fact that we are not subject to the tyranny of a bottom line. 
At the heart of what distinguishes the University of Northern Colorado is community. We stand in the place of those who came before us, and others will stand in our place when we are long forgotten. We have a tremendous responsibility to make decisions that will sustain the life of this community. Every decision must be made with the end goal of creating a thriving community of teaching and learning where lives are transformed.
One of the things that became very clear last spring as we talked about diversity and campus climate is that community doesn’t just happen. It has to be built, maintained, encouraged and periodically re-examined. We have to ask ourselves how it feels to be a member of this campus community—and how it feels to be a campus community member in the city of Greeley. And if we don’t like the answers to those questions, we have to ask ourselves what we’re going to do about it. 
With input from our campus discussions in the spring and leadership from our new Dean of Students, we have established a bias response team and a process for students to bring forward concerns about bias. We have also been working with the federal Community Relations Service on how we can address campus climate and develop internal processes to help build a respectful campus community. We must strive be a community that doesn’t just tolerate diversity, but embraces it in its broadest sense—diversity in race and ethnicity, as well as in thought and culture.
Through the leadership of Professor Bob Brunswig and the Community Development and Outreach Institute, we are working with a local coalition called Realizing Our Community. The coalition, which is lead by the city and funded by the Colorado Trust, is exploring how different groups can be integrated into the broader Greeley community.
That we can succeed in building a sustainable community—on our campus and beyond—is one of my greatest hopes for us, because it will be the doorway to so many other successes. All of you are doing many great things on our campus, but it is not enough to do them individually. If we are to reach our full potential—to succeed at transforming the lives of tomorrow’s students, at being a national education thought leader, at meeting the needs of an ever-changing Colorado—we must harness the energy that only a community can produce.
How will we do this?
This is a question we need to answer together, and it’s clear from the latest draft of the Academic Plan that many of you are already thinking about it. The plan was distributed to campus mailboxes, and there will be additional copies at the reception this afternoon. In case you haven’t seen it, the plan focuses on building a teaching and learning community where every member is engaged and valued. Regardless of whether you’ve participated in the planning up to this point, I encourage you to go to one of the campus conversations the steering committee will be hosting later this month. They’ll be talking about how we can build and sustain this community.
We must shift away from “crisis mode” thinking and begin focusing on opportunities. We’re never going to run out of short-term crises. Our history is full of references to funding promised and not delivered and the like. It is time to capitalize on the things we’re doing right.
There are many.
In the past year we have put together a new and energized leadership team which is working with faculty and staff to focus on moving forward rather than on reacting. We will aggressively recruit students in Colorado and beyond. As an example, I traveled with the football team to Hawaii last weekend. I was privileged to participate in events aimed at extending our long and storied tradition of welcoming Hawaii’s remarkably diverse students into our campus community. Athletics Director Jay Hinrichs and I joined two of our admissions counselors to meet with 200 parents and students who are interested in attending UNC. I also had the pleasure of talking with some of our many alumni there, who have shaped Hawaii education and society in many ways for more than half a century.
Last month we announced our unique partnership in the Colorado School of Public Health. We will be working with Colorado State University and the University of Colorado to meet the growing need for public health professionals throughout the Rocky Mountain west. As partners, we are coordinating our efforts to prepare public health professionals by bringing together programs that already exist at each institution. As a result, this virtual School of Public Health will be much greater than the sum of its parts. Not only will it address a public need; it will also provide our faculty and students with exciting opportunities in the future.
We have also completed the third phase of our faculty-researched economic impact study, which examines how we contribute to the community in ways not immediately apparent in the bottom line. The study, which is on our website, highlights some of the things we are doing to provide learning opportunities for our students and, at the same time, improve the quality of life in our community with contributions such as cultural and athletics events, faculty expertise and campus community members’ local involvement. This study is complemented by the work our faculty and students are doing with the Downtown Development Authority and the Small Business Development Center that is housed in our Monfort College of Business.
As we work to show those beyond our campus what we do here, I hope you will join me in reaching out to the Greeley community. In a few minutes, Mayor Selders will share a proclamation that speaks to celebrating this connection.
We must also celebrate our faculty. They are national and international experts in their fields with experience teaching and performing all over the world. They are teacher-scholars who think beyond the boundaries of their disciplines and get involved beyond our campus borders. They provide our students far more than classroom instruction. They are mentors in both scholarship and life—offering unlimited assistance on research papers, holding late night and weekend study sessions, and taking students into their homes and families. It is often they who provide the spark that unleashes the transformative power of education.
We must build a campus where faculty can fulfill their potential to transform the lives of students and we, as a university, can fulfill our potential to transform Colorado as our founders intended.
I envision at the heart of this campus an internationally acclaimed center for research and innovation in education. It will be a testing ground and clearinghouse for best practices and a focal point for the many education-related centers already on our campus. Through this center, we will become the institution to be consulted on educational matters and the leader in developing state and national policy for education at all levels.
This will be our next stride toward the vision our founders set forth at their cornerstone laying ceremony. State Sen. J.W. McCreery—who championed the legislation that created the State Normal School—made it clear that we are not to focus solely on the education of our students, as important as that is, but also on meeting the needs of the larger community.
He told those who were gathered in this very place: “...The foundation of the building has been laid; and, not only so, but the foundation of an institution more durable than the material of the building has been established.
“...We will believe in the permanence and generous support of our institution. We have faith that when the narrow niche of time in which we stand has been lost; when the political bickerings amid which the labor has been performed, have passed into oblivion; when our own places and the personal relations which we have borne to the founding of this institution have long been forgotten, the intellectual, moral, and spiritual influence set in motion by the institution which we founded will continue to go on, increasing in power and glory, until time shall end.
“...may this school prove to the state an opportunity, to our common schools a pillar of light, and to all the institutions of the state a co-worker in the history of the greater Colorado yet to be.”
We stand here 117 years later, where Sen. McCreery stood and spoke those words, and we can say that the University of Northern Colorado has indeed become what the Senator envisioned—and we are just getting started.