University of Colorado interim president Hank Brown has pledged to raise $500,000 every year for the next five years to keep Nobel laureate Carl Wieman on campus.
Interim chancellor Phil DiStefano’s office will come up with another $500,000 each year, bringing to $1 million a year the amount CU has anted up for the physicist’s initiative to transform the way college students learn science.
Wieman, who shared the Nobel Prize in physics in 2001, said Monday he was uncomfortable talking about whether the $5 million pledge is what’s keeping him at CU.
“I never went to anyone and said that if you don’t give me this money I’m going to leave,” he said.
Wieman said he considers CU’s pledge “seed money” to entice private donors to fund the initiative.
Other professors, Wieman said, won’t support the science initiative unless money pours in from the private sector to fund the project over the long haul.
Brown has said another university offered Wieman a $14 million budget for his project.
The initiative will measure how students learn science and define what students should learn in undergraduate courses, Wieman said. He hopes to create a center on the Boulder campus that will train people to help change curriculum in the science departments, making it more engaging through technology and deeper discussion on fewer topics.
“Most science courses are covering too many topics and more material than a normal human brain can process,” Wieman said.
Wieman was one of the first recipients of the Marsico Endowed Chairs in Excellence, which provides him about $11,000 per month to use as he wishes, CU spokeswoman Michele McKinney said.
He said he will use most of that endowment for the science initiative.
Wieman was one of the first professors on campus to use “clickers.” The devices let students answer multiple-choice questions during a lecture by clicking buttons, cluing professors in to whether students are grasping the material.
Staff writer Jennifer Brown can be reached at 303-820-1593 or jenbrown@denverpost.com.
