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Methods

To create this project, I visited the Colorado College Special Collections and searched through folder names to find relevant information. Through this search I found time periods where there was a plethora of information about Colorado College Colorado Springs relations or events that seemed to bring out information about the way that Colorado College saw and represented this relationship. I then related these events and time period to Gavazzi’s ideas about relationships between town and gown and the ways he suggests to improve these relationships. This project certainly has flaws in its methodology. Most of these flaws are related to time and resource restraints as well as the large scope of this project. This project focuses on time periods where there was a wealth of easily accessible information about the view that the college had of its role in the community, however it is unlikely that any of these sources create a complete picture of the relationships between the Colorado College and Colorado Springs communities during the given time period. Many of them speak only to the relationship that the school holds with the businessmen or the political leaders and even then, I only had access to certain documents. There is also no clear or complete community relations or Colorado Springs folders or boxes in the Colorado College Special Collections which means I likely didn’t see everything that pertained to the decades or events that I chose, making this database incomplete. Most documents were found through random searching through folders that seemed potentially relevant to the topic. Many assumptions are therefore made when classifying relationships using Gavazzi’s relationships and local suggestions. Furthermore, each decade in this project could easily be its own research project and take a whole block to get a clear picture of interactions between the town and the school during a given period. There is certainly potential for an extension of this project. A person could not only delve into the periods that I have already defined but also fill in the large gaps in decades wherein I did not find any pertinent information.