History
Founded in 1970, TRU was initially a community college known as Cariboo College, with government funding and support.
Five community colleges were granted authority to offer baccalaureate degrees following a 1988 government initiative designed to increase access to degree programs in British Columbia. These five institutions—Fraser Valley, Kwantlen, Malaspina, Cariboo, and Okanagan—were renamed university colleges. Initially, they offered degrees under the aegis of one or more of the three provincial universities. In 1995, they were awarded the authority to offer academic degrees and college diplomas in their own right.
Also in 1995, the province of British Columbia enacted legislation changing the institution's name to University College of the Cariboo. In 1998 the institution began offering its first undergraduate degrees.
Thompson Rivers University was established by the Thompson Rivers University Act, and the college was renamed effective April 1, 2005. From that point forward, the institution became a full degree-granting university. As part of the agreement with the province, all courses and programs administered by the former British Columbia Open University (BCOU) became part of the new university under the Open Learning Division. On July 1, 2007, all TRU, Open Learning (TRU-OL) operations relocated from Burnaby to the BC Centre for Open Learning building, which is located on the Kamloops campus.
The logo of Thompson Rivers University is a combined shield and logotype. The shield is composed of a sunrise representative of the Kamloops region, which averages over 2,000 hours of sunshine annually, and of the rising sun of enlightenment traditionally associated with higher education. The mountains in the shield represent the terrain of the region, which is located between the Coastal and Rocky Mountain ranges. The lines flowing from the mountains symbolize the meeting of the North and South Thompson Rivers at Kamloops. These lines also form a reference to the joining of UCC and BC Open Learning to become Thompson Rivers University. The colours, sage green and royal blue, reflect both the natural surroundings of the area and the boldness aspired to by the institution.
In 2010, while celebrating the school's 40th anniversary, the school had its 40,000th graduate—Josephine Gambaretto.
Read more about this topic: Thompson Rivers University
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.”
—Eric Hoffer (1902–1983)
“History has neither the venerableness of antiquity, nor the freshness of the modern. It does as if it would go to the beginning of things, which natural history might with reason assume to do; but consider the Universal History, and then tell us,—when did burdock and plantain sprout first?”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“We don’t know when our name came into being or how some distant ancestor acquired it. We don’t understand our name at all, we don’t know its history and yet we bear it with exalted fidelity, we merge with it, we like it, we are ridiculously proud of it as if we had thought it up ourselves in a moment of brilliant inspiration.”
—Milan Kundera (b. 1929)