June 5, 2025

Boulder’s Naropa University replacing longtime president

Paul Burkhardt has been hired as Naropa University’s new president.
Paul Burkhardt has been hired as Naropa University’s new president. Courtesy Naropa University.
By

BOULDER — Charles Lief, Naropa University’s president for the past 13 years, is stepping down and will be replaced in August by Paul Burkhardt, who was most recently provost at the University of Olivet in Michigan.

Burkhardt will lead Naropa, a liberal arts school with a Buddhism-inspired curriculum founded in 1974 by Tibetan Buddhist teacher Chögyam Trungpa, through a period of transition, as the school sells off much of its Boulder campus real estate and increases its focus on online and hybrid learning. 

“The Naropa Board of Trustees has complete confidence in Dr. Burkhardt’s vision, courage and leadership — and in his deep alignment with Naropa’s core values. We are confident he will carry forward Naropa’s legacy of fostering a culture of belonging, embracing our social and ecological interdependence, and working together with our students to create a more just and regenerative world,” Naropa board co-chairs Suzanne Benally and Mark Wilding said in a prepared statement. 

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Before taking over Naropa’s seventh president, Lief served as an attorney for the university and a volunteer member of its board of trustees.

“My wife Judy, herself a former Naropa president, and I have been part of Naropa University since its founding in 1974,” Lief, whose departure as president has been planned for months, said in a statement. “Naropa’s unique niche is the main reason it continues to thrive at a challenging time for small liberal arts colleges in the U.S. It is exciting that new generations of faculty, staff and executive leadership, grounded in our mission, are bringing wisdom and fresh ideas to Naropa. Higher education in the U.S. is at a critical juncture, and I couldn’t be happier with the selection of Paul as the leader to guide Naropa into the future. I look forward to partnering with him on a successful transition.”

Core Spaces LLC, a Chicago-based student-housing developer, is under contract to take over Naropa University’s main Boulder campus at 21st Street and Arapahoe Avenue. Core also bought a pair of properties last fall from Naropa — the Alaya Preschool site on 19th Street and a Guadeloupe Street residence rented by Lief — for $3.4 million.

“We negotiated a sale of both properties to Core Spaces which was willing to enter into an agreement allowing Naropa to exercise an option to repurchase either or both properties in 2026,” Lief told BizWest in late 2024.

About six years ago, the developer made a splash when it bought the Liquor Mart property at the corner of 15th Street and Canyon Boulevard from W.W. Reynolds Cos. for $16.6 million. The parcel had been the home of a grocery store and a liquor store since 1949, and the adjacent property was the former site of Robb’s Music. Core then built the oLiv Boulder apartments on the site. That project features a 190,000-square-foot building with 146 units and 262 beds.The company, through holding company Core Boulder 28th Street LLC, bought the 99-room Best Western hotel site at 770 28th St. in late 2021 for $28.5 million with the goal of converting it into University of Colorado student housing.

In a 2024 letter to the campus community, Naropa leaders wrote that “proceeds from this sale will be reinvested in critical areas such as: hiring and retaining faculty for graduate counseling, which is key to attaining (Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs) accreditation; new graduate, undergraduate, and professional development programs; technological innovations to support faculty and students; student scholarships to increase our diversity; and campus infrastructure improvements.”

In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, Naropa has beefed up its virtual-learning programs with an eye toward reducing its physical footprint.

“Many small, liberal arts colleges have been losing enrollment over the last several years,” Lief told BizWest last year. “We are moving the other direction; we’ve grown 30% over the last 2.5 years in our enrollment,” a trend driven in large part by new virtual learners. 

“One might say (that Naropa’s curriculum) is very personal, it’s about people being together,” Lief said, but in-person learning is not an absolutely necessary element of student success. 

During the COVID-19 pandemic, Naropa proved that “given the right support, the faculty did an excellent job converting their classes to an online approach,” he said in a 2024 interview. In the years that followed, grant funding allowed the school “to hire some talented curriculum-development folks to really work on what it would take” to develop a robust curriculum specifically geared to virtual learning.

Charles Lief, Naropa University’s president for the past 13 years, is stepping down and will be replaced in August by Paul Burkhardt, who was most recently provost at the University of Olivet in Michigan.

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A Maryland native, Lucas has worked at news agencies from Wyoming to South Carolina before putting roots down in Colorado.
Categories: Higher education People on the Move Today's News Charles Lief Naropa University Paul Burkhardt
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