The American poet Robert Frost writes, “Nature’s first green is gold.” This single line invokes nature’s fundamental cycle: blossom to leaf, leaf to fruit. We see the green shoot of the new shaft of wheat; we also see the ripe, golden ear of the full-grown grain. But green and gold evoke in other ways, too. Colorado State University (CSU), founded in 1870 as a Land Grant agricultural college, has for its colors green and gold. That choice hearkens back to our roots in the land and the experimental pedagogic vision of the Morrill Act—an ethic deeply imbued in CSU’s understanding of its purpose as an educational institution. Green also symbolizes a fundamental hope students and faculty share: to learn to ask those questions that, with a spring-like force, tendril out toward the vital challenges our community, country, and world face on a daily basis. One might think of it as the green leaf of an eager mind unfolding into the needs of the day and the future. Our hopes also turn towards gold, a color that calls to mind the precious metal, precious precisely because it does not tarnish but keeps its luster bright across millennia. Gold, we know, is more than elemental. Those questions are golden that persist through untold generations of human lives and whose potency is such that we gather around them even now. They allow as to ask questions so simple they nearly shake the mind apart. What is it to be good? What is to be happy? What is the nature of the world, of ideas, of reality? Why evil, sorrow, and pain? Why must I begin this work of ancient command, to know myself, and how do I begin?

One hundred and fifty-one years past its founding as Colorado Agricultural College, CSU is now a leading research university, world-renowned for its work in the sciences, engineering, environmental sustainability, ecology, and veterinary sciences. Those STEM-centered successes bring students from within Colorado, as the Land Grant mission means most to support, and from across the nation and the globe. What is learned in those classrooms returns out to the larger world, improving communities, caring for the earth, making the planet livable for future generations. We feel this mission in true alignment with the broad mandate around which the Teagle Foundation formed: “to advance the well-being and general good of humankind throughout the world.”

CSU’s All-University Core Curriculum (AUCC) has not had a significant revision in nearly two decades. The current structure offers knowledge-based competencies in quantitative and qualitative reasoning, along with options for other explorations in the sciences and humanities, but does so in a way that reinforces the disciplinary boundaries we’re seeking to disrupt. We envision our proposed Green & Gold Initiative as the foundational and visionary pathway that will act as a touchstone for a new general education model at CSU.

Our proposed Green & Gold Initiative at Colorado State University (CSU) will establish a new general education pathway through the creation of two new courses—Questions for Human Flourishing and Thinking Toward a Thriving Planet—designed to accomplish two inter-related goals: to initiate students into the transformative, liberatory power of humankind’s most enduring questions; to introduce students to the ways in which a vital humanities-based thinking can create meaningful collaborative opportunities with STEM fields. Coinciding with CSU’s current Courageous Strategic Transformation (CST) planning, our new general-education pathway will create the fundamental educational experience for life-long learning by offering a different model for core-curriculum pedagogy—one that stresses learning how-to-learn above and beyond any narrower defined skill or knowledge. A chart outlining coherent capsules of classes that parallel the CST campus themes (see appendix), distributed to students and widely dispersed throughout the Advising network, will highlight classes across the entirety of offerings in the College of Liberal Arts (CLA) that meaningfully connect to STEM and pre-professional concerns. As part of work performed as part of our recent Teagle Planning Grant, both classes have now been approved through the University Curriculum Committee and we plan on piloting five sections in the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023. Implementation Grant funds will be used to fund the faculty teaching these courses as we work to substantiate the Green & Gold Initiative into the larger culture of CSU, as well as support the continued outreach to Advising Network, Administration, and Faculty. Enthusiasm has built quickly, from Provost to Registrar’s Office, in support of this educational vision. We find ourselves in the perfect position to implement Teagle/NEH’s Cornerstone vision, and look forward to the opportunity to do so.

CSU is currently undergoing a transformative reawakening to the possibilities of visionary education, organizing the campus entirely around core themes (See Table 1 below). In pairing our Green & Gold Initiative with the larger campus themes we create an essential bond between the humanities and the sciences, imprinting students in the earliest stages of their college education with the transformative suggestion that the differing epistemologies of the contemporary university share a singular root. We sense a new thinking is developing. Perhaps it is truer to say that an ancient mode of thinking, questioning, and making, is returning—one in which the value of bringing together diverse methods and meaning-making model the work of inclusivity, valuing, and equity we are striving toward. We want to offer students what John Keats defined as negative capability: to be able to meaningfully engage “in mystery, uncertainty, and doubt without an irritable reaching after fact and reason.”