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We opened our doors on Wednesday, Sept. 5, 1877. We were able to build Old Main, our first building, with donations from our generous community and land that was donated by three prominent Boulder residents.

Joseph A. Sewall was our university president from 1877 to 1887. The first dormitory, Sewall Hall, was built in his honor in 1934. 

Mary Rippon was one of the first professors hired at CU, which demonstrated our state constitutional charge to educate men and women equally. Further, Rippon was among the first women in the nation to teach at a state university. In 1939 we named the outdoor Mary Rippon Theatre in her honor. The Colorado Shakespeare Festival is held there every year. 

Under the direction of university president George Norlin, famed architect Charles Klauder created a unique architectural style for the Boulder campus. Historians categorize the style as Tuscan vernacular, but Klauder simply called it “University of Colorado style,” using native stone inspired by the walls and roof angles of Tuscan villages. 

Our beloved fifth university president, George Norlin, was an integral part of CU Boulder’s growth. He oversaw Charles Klauder's redesign of the Boulder campus; stood up to the Ku Klux Klan when it was a powerful influence in Colorado politics; warned the country of the dangers of Nazism and Anti-Semitism; led the university through the hard years of the Great Depression; and eloquently defended academic excellence and freedom. Every CU Boulder commencement ends with a reading of The Norlin Charge, a speech he first read to the Class of 1935. 

To end discrimination on and off campus, CU Boulder civil rights efforts were initially led by the Faculty Senate Committee for Ethnic Minorities, the American Student Union and the Cosmopolitan Club. In 1938, the Faculty Senate investigated and managed to end informal segregation on campus and Jim Crow restrictions off campus by 1943. CU’s effort predated Brown v. Board of Education by 16 years.

Image from the Special Collections and Archives, �鶹��Ƶ Libraries.

The U.S. Navy Japanese Language School moved from Berkeley to Boulder, where interpreters and translators acquired language skills that served the United States during the war.

In 1948, we celebrated our first United Nations Week, which was organized by sociology professor Howard Higman. The event included visits to campus by distinguished people from across the country. In 1950, the flags of the 58 nations then composing the United Nations lined the walks in the Norlin Quad. Today, the Conference on World Affairs continues this annual tradition as part of its conference on “everything conceivable,” from the arts and sciences to diplomacy and spirituality.

Although the buffalo was declared our official mascot in 1934, it wasn’t until 1957 that the first live buffalo was donated to CU Boulder. Named Ralphie, our female buffalo runs Folsom Field with a team of handlers at every home football game. It’s definitely a sight to see.

The Colorado Shakespeare Festival (CSF) begins here at CU Boulder. This unique festival works to preserve the classics of the past and pursue the classics of the future. Plays are performed beneath summer night skies in the historic Mary Rippon Outdoor Theatre and in the newly renovated indoor University Theatre.

Image from the Special Collections and Archives, �鶹��Ƶ Libraries.

CU has won the NCAA Team Championship in skiing 13 times: 1959, 1969, 1973, 1976, 1977, 1978, 1991, 1994, 1995, 1998, 1999, 2002 and 2006. 

Our long history in space begins with alumnus M. Scott Carpenter, flying in Spacecraft Aurora 7 and becoming the second American to orbit Earth in May of 1962. In total, we have 18 CU Boulder affiliates who have become NASA astronauts. We’ve also participated in numerous satellite projects and are the only university to have designed, built and sent instruments to every planet in the solar system.

Among its long list of pioneering sustainability efforts, CU Boulder was home to the first student-run recycling environmental center. CU Boulder’s leadership in sustainability spans nearly six decades, earning a “greenest” school ranking by Sierra magazine in 2009 and featured as “the ‘greenest campus in America’” by Anderson Cooper 360.

We went from CU in Boulder to the CU system, with four locations across Colorado: Boulder, Denver, Anschutz (in Aurora) and Colorado Springs. CU Boulder remains the flagship university in the CU system.

Distinguished Professor Thomas Cech won the 1989 Nobel Prize in chemistry for his discovery that RNA in living cells is not only a molecule of heredity, but also can function as a biocatalyst. Since then, CU Boulder faculty have won four additional Nobel Prizes in physics—Carl Wieman and Eric Cornell in 2001, John Hall in 2005 and David Wineland in 2012.

The world-changing Engineers Without Borders is established here at CU Boulder. In an effort to improve lives in developing countries, civil engineering professor Bernard Amadei founded the program, which allows student engineers to gain real-world, hands-on experience abroad and has positively impacted communities in more than 45 countries.

Several CU Boulder research faculty shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore for their contributions to the international report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. They include faculty from the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences, the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research, the ecology and evolutionary biology department and the economics department. This photograph is of Tingjun Zhang, one of our researchers who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his contributions.  

The Leo Hill Leadership Speaker Series began on campus to allow our students and community members to hear from nationally known leaders, including Robert Gates and Mae Jemison. They share their stories and encourage others to tap into their own unique strengths.