Russell “Russ” Moore is the longest, continuously serving provost among all institutions in the Association of American Universities, the consortium of the nation’s major research universities. Last fall, Moore announced he was stepping down from the role after 15 years of service as provost. 

During his tenure, CU Boulder’s total enrollment grew from 29,952 undergraduate and graduate students in the 2010–11 academic year—Moore’s first full year as provost—to 38,941 in the 2024–25 academic year, an increase of 30%. The university’s sponsored research funding grew from $359 million in the 2010–2011 academic year to $742 million in the 2023–24 year, an increase of 107%. 

Moore chats with Lynne Howard, BFA program coordinator, before the State of the Campus address. Photo by Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder.

He led a transformation of CU Boulder’s research and innovation culture, resulting in CU Boulder being recognized in 2023 as a leading university for startup creation. He is credited with helping to transform the campus’s academic culture into a more human-centered, cooperative, open and transparent one and led its academic mission through the after-effects of the Great Recession of 2007–09; the COVID-19 pandemic; the confrontations and reconciliations within the academic community following the murder of George Floyd and other Black citizens; and the Marshall Fire, which claimed Moore’s own home. 

Moore is a professor of integrative physiology and an adjunct professor in the Department of Medicine at the University of Colorado Anschutz Medical Campus. His research focuses on adaptations of the heart to physiological and pathological stress. 

Here, Moore discusses the past, present and future of CU Boulder’s academic mission. 

What brought you to CU Boulder in 1993, and what made you stay?

Two really great tenured faculty members in physiology—now integrative physiology—recruited me with the idea that we could build a nationally recognized department. What I quickly found was that you can do anything here; it was then and is now a place where faculty can be entrepreneurial and adventurous. I can’t imagine being anywhere else. 

What’s the best part of being provost, and what accomplishments are you most proud of?

The best parts of the job are what people don’t see—the relationships that have helped us create a culture of transparency and collaboration across units that historically don’t collaborate. We’ve built a marvelously collaborative environment that you don’t see at a lot of other places: my team (collaborating) with our partners in Strategic Resources and Support, first under Kelly Fox, then Pat O’Rourke, now Jennifer McDuffie. And of course collaboration with our terrific deans, who I believe are the best we’ve had here, and our strengthened partnership with the Boulder Faculty Assembly. 

In higher education, there is too much competition, fragmentation and mistrust in too many places, and we’ve worked hard to eliminate that here. We have more work to do, of course, but we’ve built this environment out of a commitment to a continuous conversation, to authenticity, to respect and, really, to vulnerability and to being real and being human at all points in carrying out the academic mission. 

I’m also proud of the work we’ve done in transforming the university into a more interdisciplinary, more creative and more dynamic research institution. Two examples are Academic Futures—our blueprint for transforming CU Boulder’s mission for the public good—and the transformation of our College of Media, Communication, and Information (CMCI) into CMDI – the College of Communication, Media, Design and Information. These were efforts that involved visionary contributors among our faculty and staff, in the case of Academic Futures, and visionary leaders like Lori Bergen, the founding dean of CMCI, in the case of the transformation to CMDI. 

Talk more about the unique, entrepreneurial academic environment here and how you’ve seen that evolve. 

As I said, it was here when I got here. It’s kind of a permanent fixture of CU Boulder. A colleague Doug Seals and I recently co-authored a paper that explored how CU’s Integrative Physiology Department went from a small department rooted in physical education to a nationally recognized research and teaching program. We built a critical mass of National Institute of Health investigators who were focused on interesting and emerging areas of physiology; and three decades later, here we are with a unique and nationally influential program. 

Moore talks with Director Reiland Rabaka of the Center for African and African American Studies before the State of the Campus address. Photo by Glenn Asakawa/CU Boulder.

Similarly, you can look at something like the Emirates Mars Mission. For LASP and for CU Boulder, it has been a huge undertaking, but that’s why we did it. We had the opportunity to try partnering with a foreign government on a single space mission that required new thinking, new systems and procedures, and that tested the university’s ability to work more quickly and more cohesively. It was a big risk, but this is the kind of place where we could do it. 

And this has been true of other projects—the National Solar Observatory that today makes us a global center of research in heliophysics, and of course our BioFrontiers Institute, which started as an entrepreneurial idea of CU Nobel Prize winner Tom Cech. Add to these collaborative visions like the Colorado Shakespeare Festival, The ATLAS Institute and the re-envisioned Conference on World Affairs. They all started with singular entrepreneurial visions that became integrated efforts and are now world renowned. 

Incidentally, in all this, one of the things I’m most proud of is that we haven’t lost our commitment to being a truly comprehensive university. It would have been easy to become just a science and technical university, which in my opinion isn’t nearly as interesting or as fun or as valuable. 

What will you miss the most, and least, about leading CU Boulder’s academic mission?

I’ll not miss dealing with budgets and their human impacts. I wish we could fund every endeavor to its maximum and give people all that they need to realize every aspect of their academic visions; but of course we can’t. I won’t miss a lot of the conflicts—especially with good people I like and respect—many of which arise out of assumptions and misunderstandings. Of course, you can’t make decisions and move things ahead without some conflict. 

I will miss my colleagues and my team, many of whom have become dear friends. We have taken on some really difficult things in maintaining and transforming the academic mission and have gone through hard times—COVID-19; the confrontation with issues of race around the George Floyd murder and the murders of other Black citizens; the ongoing effort to create a work culture here that busts up the hierarchies and replaces them with partnerships; and, of course, the current moment we’re in, which is offering daily challenges. I’ll miss the camaraderie that arises out of all of these challenges. You can’t confront these kinds of challenges without growing closer together. 

What are you looking forward to in CU Boulder’s coming decades? 

It’s going to be exciting and challenging in the extreme. We’re going to need to meet the demands of an increasingly complex, dynamic and fast-paced future. When I talk about change, it’s not about changing the mission, it’s about changing how we are organized and how we behave to meet the mission. 

We have to be bold enough to say we truly will prioritize our time and effort to have the most impact on the mission, and that means, unfortunately, we have to make choices not to do some things. We shouldn’t be afraid of that—lots of things have value and worth. But absent an infinite resource base, we have to be smart about what we choose to do. We have to remember that in addition to creating new knowledge through research, scholarship and creative work, we’re also helping students prepare for an even more complex life ahead. 

The work futurist Heather McGowan spoke here a few years ago and told us that students will have multiple careers. She asked us what we are giving to them to help them transform to meet each of those moments. It’s a central question. Our answers matter enormously. We have to make sure our students are well equipped to act and thrive and fuel their curiosity in a rapidly evolving future. I think there are great opportunities to involve more undergraduate students in research, scholarship and creative work earlier in their CU Boulder experience—the benefits of that would be unbelievable. And I think we’ll make accelerated progress in stackable certificates and micro-credentials, in online graduate programs, and in more ways for the public to gain access to the university’s learning resources on small, medium and large scales. 

Provost Russell Moore and CU Boulder's deans at a recent "Big Lebowski" themed tribute to Moore hosted by deans Lori Bergen and Robert McDonald at CU Boulder's UMC Connection

And of course, our work in sustainability is going to expand greatly and, I believe, cement our leadership position in that area. All of this is going to revolutionize how we serve the state and the world, how people come to us and how we come to them, and I’m looking forward to seeing it. 

What advice do you have for your successor? 

I’m looking forward to working with whoever is chosen as my successor, and I intend to support that person wholeheartedly. I’m not big on giving a ton of advice, but first would be to remember that entrepreneurialism I spoke of. It’s gold, so I would not try to regiment and overly structure things. 

Second—continue to engage in meaningful communication and conversation—and that, of course, means listening. Then, be clear about your mistakes: Always own them. Be human, and don’t forget the humanity that is at the heart of the mission. Everything we do here is human-based: thought, inquiry, teaching, service. We don’t want to sacrifice that human purpose, or our human approach in carrying out the academic mission, or the place is greatly diminished. In the end, your main job as provost is to help people to find joy in their jobs and see themselves thrive in this amazing place. 

What will life-after-provost service look like for you? 

I’m going to finish up some special projects over the next year or so. We’ll be moving into our rebuilt home, and I’ll be looking forward to a ridiculous amount of travel, reading, fly fishing, barbecuing, and lots of time spent with my wife, kids and grandchildren. 

Finally, what lessons for the university community can be found in your favorite movie, ‘The Big Lebowski’?

Oh, that’s fairly easy. Sometimes there’s a lot of confusion, and we work at cross-purposes only to chase down fake leads that wind up in dead ends. But even in doing that, you have to care about the rules, pay your rent on time, have a rug that really ties the room together, and remember that in the end, CU abides. And so do we.