Confronting the Great Issues of the Day Video Transcript

Chancellor Robert Coombe: International universities don’t have to be located on the coasts anymore. They can be anywhere throughout the world. And so we are in this extraordinarily wonderful position to develop that in a coherent way, in a really focused and coherent way within the University for the benefit of our students, such that everybody graduating from this university is going to have a level of international experience, is going to have a level of cultural understanding that will enable them to move into these pivotal positions in the world, whatever path they may choose.

What we hope to do here at the University of Denver is to play this kind of catalytic role, to move the Morgridge College of Education, in particular, into a position where it can leverage all of the intellectual assets that we have available here at the university against these great educational issues of the day, whether it’s early childhood education or urban education or K-12 reform or access and affordability of higher ed—whatever it may be. With the programs that we’re developing at the Morgridge College, with the way that we are building the faculty through this group of endowed chairs that we’ve now been fortunate to have raised the money for, through the programs that are surrounding them, we will structure that college in a manner that is focused on issues such that the actual structure of the programs and the faculty of the college reflects those issues, rather than a structure that reflects the traditional sort of training. We believe we can do it.

DU has been working in the area of ethics and social responsibility for years now, starting 15 or 20 years ago now with the original gift to the business school from Bill Daniels that was focused on development of an ethics curriculum. We have one of the first in the country.

That certainly has spread like a wave through the entirety of the University. And so we have curricula, we have co-curricular programs, we have a kind of campus culture that is focused on ethics and values.

More recently, in the last several years, when one speaks of ethics, the ideas have expanded to include the notions of social responsibility and sustainability. As well, the kind of institutional ethics that unfolds around the notion of individual ethical behavior and responsible behavior is what we require of our students and faculty and staff.

I think about the University being this place that is built by an enormous number of people from this extraordinarily broad array of backgrounds in many dimensions, in many dimensions. So that the University community is made up of people from vastly different socioeconomic backgrounds; vastly different racial, ethnic and religious backgrounds; vastly different geographic/international backgrounds; vastly different political persuasions. Such that it is this bubbling, boiling, percolating environment where one has the opportunity to learn from so many different people that it drives the intellectual environment and opens up people’s minds.