News from the Boulder Daily Camera a couple of weeks ago, Naropa University is selling off its main Arapahoe campus, home to the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics, the Allen Ginsberg Library, the repository of its invaluable audio-visual collection, and the site of countless extraordinary and magical moments.
The university plans to move operations to a smaller location roughly three miles away from the current campus, whose sale will come with an option to lease the site for one to eight more years.
The deal, which will likely take at least a year to close, is also structured in a way that will allow Naropa to lease the campus back for several years. The cost of the lease will be less expensive over the first three years and then the rent will rise.
Chuck Lief, Naropa president, is quoted in Inside Higher Education:
“The sale of the campus, which is complex, won’t start generating funds for two to three years or so, because there’s a complicated series of conditions involved. That sale has nothing to do with solving any urgent financial pressures. It’s to generate investment capital so we can invest in new programming, in faculty, in students, potentially in some new facilities.”
Chuck Lief, (alongside Judy Lief, “President in the 1980’s when we first moved to Arapahoe”) address in detail some of the issues (“the decision that was made to sell the campus, the history of how we got to the Arapahoe campus, (and) the unfolding future for Naropa, using the resources that will be generated from this sale”) – here
Much sorrow, notwithstanding. The Reverend Diana McLean, “a Unitarian Universalist minister who earned a master of fine arts in creative writing at Naropa in 2009 and later worked as an administrator in the Jack Kerouac School”, is quoted in the Inside Higher Education article:
“I believe that some spaces are made sacred not by religious affiliation but by what happens there. Places either I or my Naropa classmates have described that way include (the) Performing Arts Center, the sycamore tree (outside the Allen Ginsberg Library), the tea house, the print shop, and more…”
As well as the physical, there’s the more intangible, the “spirit”, Maclean cites, specifically, the “lineage of writers who had been there in years past.”, the phenomenal gathering of minds gathered over the years under the aegis of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (so wittily named). Allen’s initial, and Anne Waldman‘s continuing, commitment to a vital, and, quite frankly, essential, lineage (what she elsewhere has referred to as “the outrider tradition“) – all that history, (almost impossible to over-emphasize her extraordinary and remarkable achievement).
And these are opinions expressed not just by Maclean but by myriad Naropa graduates, students (past and present). The profound experience of Naropa and The Kerouac School, and real concern for the future.
But, a Buddhist university – and the heart of Buddhist training, right? – letting go. All is indeed transience.
We wish the experiment continued success. We’ll keep you posted.
More academic news – The Woodberry Poetry Room at Harvard got a $250,000 grant
“The funding will enable the poetry room to digitize 2,000 of its most rare, at-risk reel-to-reel recordings and create a Library of Voices website, a digital AV platform on which the curators hope to explore fresh ways for visitors to engage with literary recordings in the online environment…. Following the digitization phase, the curators will work with a design firm to create the Library of Voices website, which will feature more than 150 archival and contemporary highlights from the collection, representing almost a century of the spoken word…The Voices site, which is set to launch in Spring 2026, hopes to reflect the feel of the poetry room itself.”
Mary Walker Graham, assistant curator at the poetry room is quoted:
“We want to bring the same thoughtfulness of design that’s found in the poetry room’s architecture — an architecture intended for listening — into the digital space,”
We noted Allen Ginsberg’s recordings in the Woodberry Poetry Room – here
Neeli Cherkovski – don’t miss the wonderful collection of voices this month in The Brooklyn Rail – “In Memoriam – A Tribute to Neeli Cherkovski“, poems and recollections, in honor of our dear friend Neeli, who passed away, aged 78, in San Francisco, this past March, lovingly assembled by Raymond Foye. Footage of Neeli, poems by Neeli, contributions from, among others, Garrett Caples, A.D.Winans, Charles Bernstein, Kit Robinson.. the list is a long one (Neeli had many friends) – read them all
and, speaking of memorials, don’t miss Penelope Green’s notice on Hettie Jones in The New York Times
August 30 R.Crumb‘s birthday today. See our past posting on the great cartoonist – here
and it’s Van Morrison‘s birthday too!