Dear Alumni, Parents, and Friends of Colorado College,

The focus of this issue of the Bulletin is this special place — Colorado College. It’s an appropriate theme as a new class arrives and settles into four years here at the foot of Pikes Peak, in the urban setting of Colorado Springs, in this place as old as Cutler Hall and as new as the solar panels on Spencer Center. When I think about our distinctive place, the importance of stewardship of the college and what that means is on my mind.

One way we think about stewardship is highlighted in the feature story on CC’s sustainability program. We included this initiative in our strategic plan to ensure that our responsibility to preserve this beauty for future generations is front and center in our decisions — what energy sources we use, our throw-away paper, water use, preserving the urban forest, and other practical considerations.

But sustainability is about more than our physical plant. As the liberal arts college of the Rocky Mountain West, we have a responsibility to provide an education that asks students who are immersed in this beautiful landscape to think about their place in the world, and their duty to preserve it. Therefore, our strategic plan calls for supporting programs that nurture within our students a sense of place — established programs such as the State of the Rockies Project and new ones such as the Office of Field Study. The Rocky Mountain region is our learning lab.

It commands the attention of today’s students, who will be tomorrow’s leaders.

Lastly, our stewardship of this special place calls us to leave the college in a better state than we found it. Our work to develop and live by a campus master plan and renovate key facilities (Spencer Center, Slocum Hall, El Pomar Sports Center, and the upcoming renovation of Tutt Library), as well as the importance of building our endowment to sustain the college into the future are key parts of what we mean by sustainability at Colorado College.

Our 2015 Commencement speaker, chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Bro Adams ’72, eloquently called upon our graduates to be stewards of the college: “The obligation to serve this institution stems from the fact that everything we see around us and everything that we did here was provided for us by others who went before. The buildings where we learned and played, the class rooms and labs where we studied, the scholarships that helped  many of us attend — all of these things were gifts.”

Thank you for being part of our mission and for your role in sustaining Colorado College.

With warm regards,

Jill Tiefenthaler