The University of Colorado at Boulder was the first higher education institution in the United States to be named after a rock.  Established in 1876, the Boulder campus beat out both Flora Stone Mather College (1888) and Slippery Rock University (1889).  It was founded almost one hundred years before Stony Brook University and Simon’s Rock College.

Phil Di Stefano and Russell Moore were named baldest administrative team in higher education history.  Chancellor Di Stefano (aka Old Baldy) and Provost Moore (aka Chrome Dome) were honored at the 2020 meeting of Bald-Headed Men of America, an organization founded in 1972 as a self-help organization for men suffering with alopecia

CU Boulder by the Numbers

1. The top 1% of out-of-state students have a net worth greater than the bottom 90% of Colorado resident students.
2. 99.77% of CU-Boulder students smoke marijuana on a daily basis.  Note: This figure does not include male Mechanical Engineering majors.
3. Only 45.34% of fraternity or sorority members have been convicted of DUI, disorderly conduct, public drunkenness or open container violations.  The remaining 54.66% had better lawyers.
4. CU Students for Trump lost their funding when the only remaining member was the organization’s faculty advisor, John C. Eastman, 2020-21 Visiting Scholar in Conservative Thought and Policy
5. While fewer than 2% of CU-Boulder students identify as African-American, photos in Admissions Office materials for prospective students make the university appear to be one of the country’s HBCUs.

Phillip Lindsay was the first college football player permitted to wear an oversized helmet to accommodate his hair.  The 5XL helmet was almost twice as large as the standard issue for Division I college players.

The University of Colorado’s first humor magazine was issued in 1893.  The Buffalo Turd was the brainchild of CU sophomore Henry Alexander Lambert, the publication’s first editor-in-chief.  Lambert was inspired when he narrowly missed stepping in the pictured “bison pie” on his way from his residence in Woodbury Hall to Guggenheim Library.  The first story was “President Baker’s brains found scattered across campus.”

University of Colorado President Mark Kennedy is the only college or university president never to have completed high school. Earth Muffins investigative reporters learned that his undergraduate degree from St. John’s University and his MBA from the University of Michigan were bogus.  And, the Minneapolis Star Tribune reported that his diploma from Pequot Lakes High School was also a forgery; Kennedy having misspelled the school’s name “Pequod” (with apologies to Herman Melville).

As a result of the Great Depression, there was a food shortage on campus and meat, in particular, was especially scarce.  Cafeteria cook, Horace Wexler, came up with the idea of sacrificing the original Ralph the Buffalo and serving him to the unsuspecting students as beef.  When President George Norlin discovered what had happened, he told newspaper reporters that Ralph had been kidnapped by CSU students, thus starting the rivalry that has continued to this day.  For many years, there was no CU mascot.  In the 1960s the tradition continued with the first female bison, Ralphie I.  As more recent mascots passed away their meat was offered to C4C but rejected because it was not free range.  Earth Muffins is investigating whether the aptly-named Alferd Packer Grill actually deep-fries deceased faculty members and serves them as chicken tenders.