A campus place-based first-year curriculum operationalizes campus place, not as a neutral backdrop that students pass through on their way to a vocation, but as a purposeful assemblage of physical, verbal, and natural artifacts that play an important role in students’ adjustment process and in their higher education journey. The curriculum described here is based on David Gruenewald’s observation that “place is profoundly pedagogical” (621); it activates the campus itself pedagogically, providing students opportunities for pausing, exploring, researching, and sharing place-based discoveries in multiple modes in our Communication Across the Curriculum program. Now the standard curriculum in our first-level course, it successfully addresses two issues of interest to WPAs: establishing a stable-but-generative curriculum that provides consistency across many sections while allowing innovation and choice for students and instructors. This curriculum promotes and enhances students’ understanding of their new campus-as-place—its mission, history, art, architecture—through multi-modal communication assignments. A place-based curriculum both assists students in their transition to the university and helps them to identify their goals in the context of the university’s—and their own—past, present, and future by allowing meaningful communication projects