CU-Boulder working to propose new colleges

BOULDER – The University of Colorado-Boulder will begin the preliminary work that could result in the creation of the university’s first new colleges in 50 years.

CU-Boulder’s provost Russell L. Moore on Wednesday said the university will take the first steps to formally propose the creation of a college focused on media, communication and information, and a college designed around CU-Boulder’s strengths in the environment and sustainability.

The goal is to submit proposals to the CU Board of Regents within the next 12 months, and, if approved, form the new colleges and begin enrolling students by 2015.

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Moore said the college or school devoted to media, communication and information would house programs in journalism, advertising and design, communication, film production and film studies, media studies and a department of information studies.

Moore said the college will produce journalists, editors and media professionals, communication scholars, media experts, advertisers and media designers, filmmakers and film theorists, and experts in the emerging field of information architecture and design.

If approved, Moore said, a college of the environment and sustainability will “bring together some of the finest researchers and teachers on the campus” in disciplines and programs that include environmental science, environmental policy and environmental design while “drawing upon assets from some of the campus’s most dynamic institutes,” including the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, CIRES, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, INSTAAR. and the Renewable and Sustainable Energy Institute, RASEI.

Moore said the move to create the colleges is supported by three years of work, by recommendations from internal and external committees that reviewed existing programs and structures on the campus and, above all, “by the clear economic, workplace and research demands of the world around us.

“This isn’t adding to an ivory tower – it’s breaking apart the ivory tower and investing in a bright and very real future for our students and our faculty,” Moore said. “This will challenge us to rethink how we teach, how we organize ourselves as a research and scholarly community, how we generate and use resources, and how we deliver graduates into the job market or into realms of further scholarship.”

Moore said the next step in this process is to form implementation committees to create blueprints for forging the colleges, examining such issues as funding and fundraising, administration, curriculum development and how to integrate the work of the institutes with the role and mission of the new colleges.