The Soul of a New College
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Part One: The
Origins
of a Great Idea
By Carson Reed ('83)
Reprinted from Metropolitan Magazine, Winter, 1987
One clear
night in 1949, a handful of college students
from
Colorado A & M (“Aggies,” as
everyone called them) set off on a mission
of great collegiate importance.
Armed with cans of paint and paintbrushes,
the group drove laughing and jostling through
the darkness out of Fort Collins and down
U.S. 287, to the rest stop at the junction
of 287 and Seven Mile Road.
There, at the crossroads between the University
of Colorado and Colorado A & M, stood
an ancient and proud American Legion cannon,
which the students ceremoniously striped in
green and gold—the school colors.
Among the group of young men was a freshman
football player named Harry Tremmer and a
young, idealistic student government leader
named Roy Romer.
As the years passed, most of the group
would lose touch with one another. Colorado
A & M would become CSU, and the football
rivalry that had inspired their late-night
adventure
would take a 30-year vacation. Eventually,
Temmer, the freshman football player, would
go on to become an engineer and then a
teacher.
Romer, the student government leader, would
become a lawyer and then a politician.
But that night, they were nothing more then
Aggies out to show a little boisterous school
spirit. The problem that would plague urban
areas a generation later, the crisis that
would change higher education forever, must
have been the furthest things from their minds.
Certainly, neither of them had any inking
that they would become willing participants
in the creation and evolution of the largest
four-year urban college in the United States.
The Demand
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In
1961, Harry Temmer had a problem. As the unit
supervisor of the airborne maintenance
and testing program at Martin Company, Temmer
was in charge of developing a routine maintenance
program for guidance and other electrical
systems on Titan missiles.
Martin was a rapidly expanding company, and
Temmer was in a hiring mood. But Temmer,
like
other managers at Martin, kept coming up
against a gaping black hole in the job market.
He could find janitors, and he could find
engineers, but in between the two he needed
all kinds of trained technicians. In Colorado,
he soon discovered, they just didn't exist.
"I went everywhere," he says. "I
went to every college in the state. Nobody
was training the people I needed half of
them didn't even understand what the hell
I was
talking about. Education in Colorado was
antiquated,
and business was suffering because of it."
The entire Denver
business community was having trouble finding
qualified job applicants, as were hospitals,
schools, and police departments.
His
experience led him to represent Martin
on
a committee of some of Colorado's industrial/technical
giants, all of which were looking for solutions
to Denver’s growing education-employment
gap. Temmer's Industrial Education Committee
hoped to leverage better "feeder"
programs out of the state higher education
system. In particular, the group felt there
was a crying need for a new college in Denver.
It was a common complaint. The entire Denver
business community was having trouble finding
qualified applicants, as were hospitals, schools,
and police departments.
The complaints usually found their way to
a legislative task force on education chaired
by then state Rep. (soon to be Sen.) Roy
Romer.
The task force, a subcommittee of the powerful
Committee on Education Beyond High School,
actively solicited studies and recommendations
from these business groups. Martin Company,
Mountain States Telephone, the Public Service
Company, and the Denver Chamber of Commerce
all submitted reports to the committee outlining
the specific educational needs that would
face metropolitan Denver in the coming decade.
The task force discovered that Denver's colleges
were producing less than half of all the
skilled
workers needed. And the problem was going
to get much worse very fast. The projections
were that the metro area would be the focal
point of the state's economy, with the bulk
of new business and industry locating in
and
around Denver. Colorado was changing fast,
but Denver was changing faster. It had been
only a year since manufacturing outstripped
agriculture as the state's number one source
of revenue, and the pace of change was accelerating
rapidly. *
If business was at the heart of Colorado's
future, and Denver was to be at the heart
of Colorado's business, then, sooner or later,
education would have to be at the heart of
Denver.
(*The Mountain States Telephone study
showed that of the 116,000 jobs that would
open up for new (male) workers between 1960-1970,
78 percent would require education beyond
high school)
The Supply
Sunday, November 18,
1962 Washington D.C.- Associated Press "Higher education is bursting at the seams,"
announced the wire service story on page four
of the Sunday Denver Post.
"Everywhere you look [there is] more of
everything: more students, more professors,
more buildings, more courses, more class hours
per day, more Saturday classes, more year-round
programs. [And yet] the first crop from the
post-war baby boom won't start pounding on college
doors until 1964."
This was strange
news to wake up to on a Sunday. It was
a full
two years before the nation's colleges would
be inundated by the first crop of post-war
18 year-olds, yet there was already a crisis-a
crisis, not of higher numbers, but of higher
expectations. More people expected to go
to college. By 1964, the article warned, "as
many as 70 percent of all high school graduates
may well be demanding a higher education."
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For Romer and the task force, the story couldn't have broken at a better time. After eight months of study, the group was finally ready to release its report. It was going to shake some people up, for sure. Their studies indicated that Denver had more to worry about than the population bulge. Denver was the target of a flood of "inmigration" that would put a strain on housing, roads, water, hospitals, and, of course, education. The metropolitan-area population was expected to triple by 1970, and the number of high school graduates would more than double-growing at a rate twice as fast as the rest of the state. Twenty-five percent of the state's high school graduates were moving to Denver immediately after they graduated, and the influx would increase sharply as industry continued to outstrip agriculture for jobs. By 1971, three times as many Colorado high school graduates would be college bound as in 1961, and more than half of them would live in metropolitan Denver.
Denver's colleges were producing less than half of all the skilled workers the city needed. And the problem was going to get much worse very fast.
Those were the kinds of alarming findings the task force was coming up with. Now, just a week before the members released those findings to the public, the situation had become national news. Maybe it would help. They were going to need all the help they could get.
The Idea
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News of the task
force report broke in a small article in the
Denver
Post on Sunday, November 25, 1962. The committee
was recommending to the legislature that it
fund a brand new four--year state college to
be located in Denver. This "Denver State
College" was to assume the facilities
of the CU Extension Center, but would be
controlled
by the board of trustees that ran the state's
four-year college system. It would open in
1964
and would admit any student with a high school
diploma or its equivalent. It could be expected
to have 30,000 students by 1980.
Although the task group was presenting a united
front to the public, members were sharply divided
on what direction Denver's educational future
should take. The group consisted of Romer,
the
chairman; Warren Rovetch, the research director/analyst;
and a group of legislators and lay and clerical
advisors: Allen Dines, Palmer Burch, Forbes
Bottomly, Frank Evans, John Ferguson, James
French, Wilkie Ham, Shelby Harper, Howard Johnson,
Monsignor William Jones, John Mackie, Roy McVickers,
Ranger Rogers, the Reverend M.C. Williams,
and
Herrick Roth.
Some of the group, John Mackie and Ranger Rogers
among them, felt strongly that Denver needed
a junior college or even a whole system of
junior colleges spread throughout the five-county
area.
Junior colleges would offer the kind of technical
training that companies like Martin so desperately
needed, and besides, the city had an abundance
of traditional four-year colleges. There were
Regis, Colorado Women's College, Loretto Heights,
and, most especially, the University of Denver.
Students who needed access to less expensive
public education could attend the CU Extension
Center or commute the 30 miles to Boulder.
But Romer, Burch, and others on the task force
were convinced that Denver needed a large
four-year
college. The studies had indicated that only
32 percent of Denver's high school graduates
were going on to college-below the national
average and far below the average for cities
of comparable size. By 1970, more than half
the state's high school graduates would come
from the four-county Denver area. The private
schools were still basically for the privileged,
and the opportunities available at the CU
Extension Center were severely limited under
Colorado
law. Students there were required to study
a minimum of two years at Boulder in order
to
get a degree. And as for DU, the committee
had been told by inside sources that the efforts
of that school to become nationally prominent
were actually decreasing the number of local
candidates it would accept.
In 1961, the Task Force for Education Beyond High School in the Denver Area projected that a Metropolitan State College would have 30,000 students by the early 1980s. Although MSC never reached those numbers by itself, the three schools of the Auraria campus came in right on the money with a fall 1983 headcount of 33,131.
For a short time in
1961, a DU philosophy professor named Bill
Rhodes sat on Romer's task force as a representative
of the Colorado Council of Churches. Rhodes
recalls a "task force barbecue"
in Romer's backyard. Over beer and burgers,
the two men discussed the idea of creating
a new four-year college in Denver.
"I told him I thought it was an important,
an absolutely necessary thing for Denver,"
Rhodes recalls. He told Romer that DU, under
the leadership of then chancellor Chester
Alter, had made the decision to recruit heavily
on a national level, in order to shake the
tag of being a regional school. Since then,
the number of in-state students at DU had
fallen sharply, and Rhodes suspected that
significant numbers of prospective students
were falling through the cracks.
Romer wanted to see just the kind of school
that would prevent that from happening-a "street
smart" kind of school that would "be
there" for local students, whatever their
backgrounds, He remembers, "I wanted
to see a school in Denver that was for people
who knew their futures would either rise or
fall by their own wits."
Where did this notion for an urban college
first come from') Romer has no idea. In the
telescope of time, it was just something that
was there in his mind, as though it had always
been there. People had talked about opening
a public college in Denver for almost as long
as there had been a Denver (CU had been fighting
to open a full-fledged branch of the college
there since at least 1886).
Where did this idea for a Metropolitan State
College come from') Harry Temmer's explanation
may be the best. Always the engineer, he
says now that the idea was as natural and
as inescapable
as gravity. 'There was an educational vacuum,"
he says. Hand you know how it is with vacuums.
Something or someone just had to fill it
up."
The Battle
Task force member Allen Dines was among the strongest supporters of the school. |
The faculties of both CU and the CU Extension Center quickly voted in opposition to the new school, as did the student body of the extension center. A poll of 1,500 extension center students showed that 99 percent opposed opening a four-year college in Denver that was not attached to CU. The Post ran a series of editorials favoring the junior college concept in Denver, and the CU regents warned that a new school could take as long as nine years to be accredited.
But the most decisive action of all was yet to come from the regents. Three weeks to the day after the task force announced its recommendations, CU made a preemptive move to secure its future in Denver forever. At a press conference, the regents announced they were eliminating the Boulder residence requirements for extension center students and that they were authorizing full degree-granting power to the center.
It was a bold move: In one puff of smoke, CU had created a full-blown four-year college in the middle of downtown Denver. Romer was breathless, if not entirely surprised. Suddenly, they had a college, and all he had was this wonderful idea.