University of Colorado Boulder

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  The University of Colorado Boulder opened its doors on the 5th of September, 1877, with a student body that was, by any modern measure, startlingly small: 15 students enrolled in the college proper and 50 more in a preparatory school attached to it. Their ages ranged from 12 to 23. The university had been founded before Colorado was even a state, its cornerstone laid on the 20th of September, 1875, five months before statehood arrived. What began in a single building on a stretch of high-altitude prairie would grow into an institution that has sent scientific instruments to every planet in the Solar System. How a frontier school, founded amid a rivalry with a city that ended up hosting a prison instead, became one of the most research-active universities in the United States is a story worth following carefully.

• 2. A Campus Born from Rivalry

  ›

  On the 14th of March, 1876, the Colorado territorial legislature passed an amendment that divided the spoils of higher education across three cities: Boulder would receive the university, Golden the School of Mines, and Fort Collins the Agricultural College. Boulder had not been the only candidate. Cañon City competed for the honor, but it was already home to the Colorado Territorial Prison. The consolation prize for losing the university bid was to host the new Colorado State Prison. Cañon City accepted that fate, and today the area around it holds six prisons. Boulder got a building instead. The cornerstone of Old Main was laid before Colorado had achieved statehood, and the structure that rose from it remains the oldest building on campus. The preparatory school that operated alongside the early university tells its own story: in those first years, so few high schools in the state could prepare students for university-level work that the campus had to run its own feeder program just to fill its classrooms.

• 3. Architecture in Sandstone

  ›

  Architect Charles Klauder is the single person most responsible for what CU Boulder looks like today. His original plans, approved in 1919, followed the Collegiate Gothic style common to East Coast schools. Then, a month or so after approval, Klauder revised his thinking entirely. He sketched in rough, textured sandstone walls, sloping multi-leveled red-orange-tiled roofs, and Indiana limestone trim. That reworked design became the template for fifteen additional buildings constructed between 1921 and 1939, and it still governs construction on campus today. The sandstone itself was drawn from a range of Front Range mountain quarries, giving each building a slightly different texture while keeping them visually unified. Norlin Library, the last building Klauder designed, carries two inscriptions on its western face composed by President Norlin himself. The larger one reads: "Who knows only his own generation remains always a child," adapted from Cicero.

• 4. Firsts and Faculty

  ›

  Mary Rippon joined CU's faculty in 1878 as its first female professor, making her one of the earliest female university instructors in the United States. She taught English grammar, German, French, and mathematics. The outdoor theater on campus that bears her name later became the site of the annual Colorado Shakespeare Festival. CU hired its first African American professor, Charles H. Nilon, in 1956, and its first African American librarian, Mildred Nilon, in 1962. Lucile Berkeley Buchanan had graduated as the university's first African American female student in 1918, nearly four decades earlier. A scholarship fund now bears the names of Charles and Mildred Nilon, designated specifically for students committed to advancing education in under-resourced schools. Ward Churchill served as a professor of ethnic studies until the university terminated him in July 2007. Among current faculty, David J. Wineland received the Nobel Prize in physics in 2012, and Thomas Robert Cech received the Nobel in chemistry in 1989, for work that revealed the catalytic properties of RNA, a discovery now foundational to modern biology.

• 5. Research at the Frontier

  ›

  In 2021, CU Boulder attracted more than $634 million in research support and spent $536 million on research and development, placing it 50th in the nation according to the National Science Foundation. No other university in the world has sent instruments to every planet in the Solar System; CU Boulder holds that distinction alone. The campus also receives more NASA astrophysics technology grants than any other academic institution. Among its notable firsts: researchers here were the first to create a Bose-Einstein condensate, a new form of matter achieved just seven hundred billionths of a degree above absolute zero. They were also the first to observe a fermionic condensate formed from pairs of atoms in a gas. The Engineering Center on the northeast side of campus houses the nation's largest geotechnical centrifuge, alongside ion-implantation and microwave-propagation facilities. In 2021, the Rustandy Building was added to bridge the Engineering Center with the Koelbel Building, linking engineering directly to the School of Business.

• 6. Buffaloes on the Field

  ›

  In 1934, the university officially adopted "Buffaloes" as the team nickname, retiring earlier press-assigned names like "Silver Helmets" and "Frontiersmen." At the final game of that year, against the University of Denver, a buffalo calf rented from a local ranch ran along the sidelines for the first time. The live mascot tradition has continued ever since; the current live mascot is a female American bison named Ralphie. The Buffaloes have accumulated 28 national championships: 20 in skiing, seven combined in men's and women's cross country, and one in football. The school rejoined the Big 12 Conference in 2024 after a period in the Pac-12, returning to a conference it had left when the old Big Eight merged with four Southwest Conference schools to form the Big 12 in 1996. Former NFL star Deion Sanders took over as football head coach in 2023, and the team saw renewed attention from that point forward. The official school colors are silver and gold, chosen to represent Colorado's mineral wealth, though black was substituted on uniforms when silver and gold proved difficult to distinguish on the field. An attempt in the early 1980s to switch the palette to sky blue and gold proved so unpopular that the Board of Regents reversed course by 1985.

• 7. Alumni Who Shaped the World

  ›

  CU Boulder ranks fourth among U.S. universities in the number of astronauts produced, excluding military academies. Among those alumni are Ellison Onizuka and Kalpana Chawla. The university has also graduated two heads of state: Mongolian president Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj and Liberian president Ellen Johnson Sirleaf. Two associate justices of the U.S. Supreme Court, Wiley Rutledge and Byron White, earned degrees here. Across all affiliated individuals, the university counts 12 Nobel Prize laureates, of whom five held university appointments when their prizes were awarded. The Wolf Law Building, the home of the University of Colorado Law School, was dedicated on the 8th of September, 2006, by then-Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer. In 2010, CU Boulder became the first fully student-run program to win the National Parliamentary Tournament of Excellence, and the CU Cycling Club, founded in 1983, counts professional cyclists Sepp Kuss and Tyler Hamilton among its alumni.