The University
Founded in 1965, Metropolitan State University of Denver has identified the following goals across all fields and at all levels of study:
- to prepare students for success in their education, career and life;
- to provide a high-quality educational experience;
- to engage, collaborate, and work with the community;
- to embrace and promote diversity.
Metropolitan State University of Denver is a comprehensive, baccalaureate and master’s degree granting, urban university that offers arts and sciences, professional, and business courses and programs to a diverse student population in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Excellence in teaching and learning is MSU Denver’s primary objective.
The University is a teaching institution where excellence in teaching and learning is accorded the highest priority. Student success, supported in a collegial atmosphere of academic freedom, is of paramount importance, and all members of the university community seek to inspire students to strive for the highest level of achievement. The University endeavors to provide students with an education that enhances the quality of their lives and enables them to be well-educated, critically-thinking citizens who contribute and participate in meaningful ways in community and civic life.
Role and Mission
MSU Denver is a comprehensive, baccalaureate- and master’s-degree granting urban university that offers arts and sciences, professional and business courses and programs to a diverse student population in an atmosphere of mutual respect. Excellence in teaching and learning is MSU Denver’s primary objective.
MSU Denver’s mission is to provide a high-quality, accessible, enriching education that prepares students for successful careers, post-graduate education, and lifelong learning in a multicultural, global, and technological society. To fulfill its mission, MSU Denver’s diverse university community engages the community at large in scholarly inquiry, creative activity and the application of knowledge.
Faculty
Almost 600 full-time faculty teach for MSU Denver. Professors are recruited and evaluated for their ability to teach and engage students. All classes are taught by academic instructors. As a culturally diverse team of academicians, 52 percent of full-time faculty are women, and 27 percent represent faculty of color.
The majority of graduate level courses are taught by appointed faculty with terminal degrees in their discipline. The University also brings real-world education into the classroom by hiring professionally qualified affiliate faculty who work in the Denver metropolitan community and use their expertise and experience.
The Campus
Metropolitan State University of Denver is located at the Auraria Higher Education Center, a 127-acre campus in downtown Denver at Speer Boulevard and Auraria Parkway. The Community College of Denver and the University of Colorado Denver share the facilities with MSU Denver.
The campus includes more than one million square feet of space for classrooms, laboratories and offices. Some administrative offices are located in restored Victorian homes in Denver’s historic Ninth Street Park, located on the Auraria site. The campus also features a child care center; a comprehensive, 184,000 square-foot library designed by Helmut Jahn of CF Murphy, which won an award from the American Institute of Architects; and one of the most unusual student union facilities in the country in the historic Bavarian-style Tivoli Brewery Building. Excellent physical fitness facilities include a block-long physical education/events center with a swimming pool, weight room, game courts, dance studios, a climbing wall, and event seating for 3,000.
The Auraria Higher Education Center’s proximity to downtown Denver enables students and faculty to use the community as a learning laboratory and to connect classroom theory to the cultural, economic, social, and political practices of the city.
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