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CU Boulder's core mission is to educate students and engage in cutting-edge scholarship and creative work, research and discovery. The success with which we carry out this mission determines our ability to accomplish our strategic imperatives, which are to shape tomorrow’s leaders, positively impact humanity and be the top university for innovation.

To ensure continuing success, the campus is now ready to embark on a conversation called Academic Futures: Rethinking the university – the futures of learning and discovery. We enter this conversation from a position of institutional strength built upon the , on budget and operational stability, and on a spirit of confidence in our collective ability to control our future in a time of rapid transitions. This moment is also marked by new leadership in many of our schools and colleges and by exciting conversations they have undertaken within their academic communities.

As the world around us is changing, so is the community and the context in which we pursue learning and discovery. New disciplines and areas of interdisciplinary discovery have arisen. The challenges facing humanity are as complex as we have ever had to face. We have new opportunities for innovation and emergent discoveries, as we see advances in gathering, analyzing and distributing information. Ten years ago, we didn’t have the iPhone, Facebook, Twitter, the Kindle or many other inventions that have revolutionized the way we work at the university, and we cannot imagine what our world will look like 10 years from now. Let’s take this opportunity to ask ourselves how we plan to educate our future student and make sure we are ready to do the research and creative work of the future. If we come together to rethink what we do, to reimagine our efforts as part of a community of learning and discovery, we can transform CU Boulder and provide a model for other institutions to follow. 

We are starting in September 2017 with a comprehensive, multi-phased visioning process that engages all our faculty, staff and students. At this stage of our process we want to hear from everyone about the directions – from their vantage point – that the campus should go. As a university, how do we more boldly engage in scholarship, teaching and service and empower our community to effectively, efficiently and creatively do our work? We are committed to transparent and open engagement and are launching a process that allows every idea to be captured and considered. An outline of the process and the timeline for our initial work can be found on this website.