Colorado Seminary

adding another level to his images paintingEvans founded the school to help civilize the newly-created (1858) City of Denver, which was little more than a mining camp at that time.

As a co-educational institution, according to College Board, under a competitive standard, the average admitted applicant is at his or her top 25% of their graduating class.[9]

The reverse initials "DU" are used as the university's shorthand moniker (rather than the more intuitive "UD") as part of a Rocky Mountain and midwestern tradition of initial reversal, similar to the University of Colorado's "CU", the University of Tulsa's "TU", the University of Oklahoma's "OU", the University of Nebraska's "NU", the University of Missouri's "MU", and the University of Kansas' "KU."
By 1880, the Colorado Seminary had been renamed the University of Denver. Although doing business as the University of Denver, DU is still legally named Colorado Seminary. The first buildings of the university were located in downtown Denver in the 1860s and 1870s, but concerns that Denver's rough-and-tumble frontier town atmosphere was not conducive to education prompted a new campus (today's campus) to be built on the donated land of potato farmer Rufus Clark, some seven miles (11 km) south of the downtown core. The university grew and prospered alongside the city's growth, appealing primarily to a regional student body prior to World War II. After the war, the large surge in GI bill students pushed DU's enrollment to over 13,000 students, the largest the university has ever been, and helped to spread the university's reputation to a national