This month's content is excerpted from "The Road to Independence and Beyond: Commemorating the University's 40th Anniversary, 1973–2013." The complete text is available on the CU Denver 40th Anniversary website.

The University of Colorado Denver (CU Denver) became an independent institution in 1973, after more than 60 years as an extension of CU Boulder. The road to independence was a long one, and in many ways it stretched far beyond 1973. This story, however, focuses on that signal year and the years immediately before and after. Those were times of rapid, tumultuous change in higher education—in Denver, Colorado, and the nation. When they had passed, the old Denver Center extension was no more, and a new, distinct institution took its first tenuous steps into the future.

Although she received her degree just as CU Denver gained independence in 1973, Diane Messamore makes it clear that she did not graduate from CU Boulder. “Our commencement was held in Boulder, and I didn’t even go,” she says. “The Denver campus where I went was strictly a mechanism for working people to get a degree. That was a great service.” When the CU Boulder Alumni Association tried to recruit her in 1991, she rediscovered her academic roots and joined CU Denver’s association instead. Since then she has given much back to the institution that launched her successful career.

Dan Fallon became dean of CU Denver’s College of Liberal Arts and Sciences (CLAS) at the birth of the Auraria campus—and had to navigate the college through a new environment nobody understood. “Just before Auraria opened, I remember [CU Denver chancellor] Harold Haak saying, ‘The great experiment begins tomorrow,’” says Fallon. During his eight-year tenure he strived to transform the entrenched image of the Denver campus as an extension center into an image of the University of Colorado at Denver.

I came to CU Denver from Berkeley in fall 1969 with a PhD “all but dissertation” and as a veteran of the Free Speech and anti-war movements. Instant culture shock: no lovely campus, no political turmoil, no protesting students, no bell bottoms. Instead I found a one-building campus crowded with serious older students who fit one or two courses into their busy home and work schedules. Citizen students I called them. Eager, serious, and self-supporting, they changed the way I taught literature. Imagine when the class was discussing that major literary theme of children versus parents; like me, half of my students spoke as parents. My first few years at CU Denver were busy, preparing new classes, finishing my dissertation, busing from Boulder to Denver, and helping care for two young children.

Sheryl Bain started at the Denver Center in 1970 as an Admissions and Records clerk before becoming assistant to the CLAS dean. During almost 30 years in that position, she enjoyed the homey closeness of the Denver Center and early CU Denver, waded into the new challenges of Auraria, and played a part in the great changes that swept the university.