There appear to be four American flags on the University of Colorado’s Boulder campus, plus one occasionally flown from Old Main.
Two are outside Folsom Field, one is in front of the Regent Administrative Center and one hangs over the Euclid Avenue and Broadway entrance to the University Memorial Center.
The one at the UMC is correctly displayed: it is larger than and elevated above the accompanying flags.
The ones outside Folsom, and the one in front of Regent, are all in violation of the United States Flag Code:
U.S. Code Title 36 Chapter 10 Section 175. Position and manner of display:
(e) The flag of the United States of America should be at the center and at the highest point of the group when a number of flags of States or localities or pennants of societies are grouped and displayed from staffs.
It’s not just a technicality of flag etiquette. It’s a vital symbol being actively ignored.
One of my computer science classes spent an hour and a half on a diversity lecture last week. An American school that actively disrespects the American flag has no right to teach diversity.
The flag is a symbol of diversity, and of a hundred other universal values that could each receive an hour-long lecture of their own. The United States is founded on a long list of simple values that Americans were taught in grade school.
If basic, widely-understood American values are to be made part of the curriculum, then so too should the flag. In a college classroom, it’s fair to assume everyone knows what the flag of the United States stands for — and that if they don’t, that knowledge is a Google search away.
I don’t want to be subjected to another lecture on a basic value that my country has stood for and my countrymen have died for since 1776.
Display the flag in every classroom.
Michael Niland
CU student
