Back to the '60s
University of Arizona tries a familiar experiment
in higher education

 

By William Trombley
Senior Editor

TUSCON, ARIZONA
IF YOU LIKED the public higher education experiments of the 1960s and early '70s--with their emphasis on undergraduate instruction and interdisciplinary courses taught by faculty members hired more for their teaching skills than for research accomplishments--then you will love the new Arizona International Campus of the University of Arizona.

This modest venture--46 freshmen and five professors--began this fall in a converted IBM facility on the outskirts of Tucson, 15 miles from the university's 35,000-student main campus.

"In the last 25 years, the University of Arizona has been transformed from a largely teaching institution into a major research university," said Celestino Fernandez, executive vice president and provost of Arizona International and a former administrator on the main campus.

But the drive for national stature in graduate study and research has resulted in neglect of undergraduates, Fernandez said--an imbalance that the new campus hopes to correct.

"We have an opportunity to develop an entirely new kind of institution, one that focuses on students and not on faculty members," he added.

This kind of talk was popular 25 or 30 years ago, when public universities began to acknowledge that many students were dissatisfied with the huge "multiversities" that dominated the landscape of American higher education.

New starts, stressing quality undergraduate instruction, were made at places like UC Santa Cruz, the Old Westbury campus of the State University of New York, and Evergreen State College in the state of Washington.

Most of these experiments failed, as students grew more conservative and faculty members trained in academic specialties triumphed over those who tried to relate one field of knowledge to another. Now, in sun-baked southern Arizona, another attempt is being made.

Education reformers are delighted.

"This is a very exciting plan that takes advantage of the best things we know about providing a powerful undergraduate experience," said Alexander Astin, director of the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA.

Yet Arizona International faces considerable opposition. Some legislators question the need for a new campus at this time, especially one with a "small college" orientation they believe to be too costly. Officials of the state's other public campuses worry that Arizona International will cut into their budgets. And many University of Arizona faculty members are unhappy about a campus that will downplay research and graduate study, that will demand heavier undergraduate teaching loads and that will not offer tenure.

But none of this criticism seems to have registered with the Arizona Board of Regents, especially those from the Tucson area, who have been pushing hard for the new campus.

"We'll be offering an option that is not available elsewhere in the state--a small-college, liberal arts environment within the framework of a major university," said Regents Chairman John Munger, a Tucson attorney.

Munger said Arizona International would "operate much more efficiently" than the state's other public universities because its faculty members, with no responsibilities to do research or to supervise graduate students, will teach almost twice as many classroom hours as those at other state institutions--the University of Arizona, Arizona State or Northern Arizona University.

Although Arizona International has opened with just a handful of students, Vice President Fernandez predicts that enrollment will reach 700 by 1999. Originally, the campus was intended to accommodate 10,000 students by the year 2015 but the regents have reduced that goal to 5,000, causing some legislators and others to wonder how much help the new campus will provide in solving the state's long-term enrollment growth problem.

In the first year, all students take a required set of interdisciplinary courses, most of which will be team-taught. For instance, an anthropologist and a specialist in American Studies are teaching "Origins and Problems of the Modern World."

"We believe students need a common learning experience in the first two years," said Edwin Clausen, director of academic programs. "It is educationally unsound to offer traditional introductory courses in subjects such as history or sociology. Students can learn those things in their third and fourth years."

One course that has been treated with particular disdain by faculty on the main campus is titled "On Becoming an Educated Person," which is taught by all five Arizona International faculty members.

According to published curriculum materials, this course will provide the "philosophical rationale and operational basis" for the new campus and will initiate "a dialogue on the nature of an educated person." A University of Arizona political scientist described it as "Navel-Gazing 101."

Clausen and Fernandez spend a lot of time trying to dispel the notion that Arizona International courses will be filled with what another University of Arizona professor called "1960s fluff."

"This is not a 'touchy-feely' curriculum," Clausen insisted. "Our courses will be far more dense, challenging and complicated than most introductory courses at places like Stanford and Harvard."

But this argument has not been found persuasive by the University of Arizona Faculty Senate, which voted last spring to "receive," but not to approve, the proposed course of study. However, the Board of Regents later approved the plan by a 7 to 2 vote.

Each Arizona International student will sign a "contract" with a faculty advisor, specifying the student's goals and the courses planned to reach these goals.

Every student must complete a "community service internship" of six credit hours, working as a volunteer for groups ranging from the Red Cross to Chicanos por la Causa, as well as a "career internship" that seeks to prepare them for jobs after graduation.

Despite the objections of some college planners, students will receive traditional grades, in addition to more experimental forms of assessment such as narrative evaluations and portfolios.

University of Arizona President Manual Pacheco, aware of the conservative inclinations of some regents, said he would not present the new college plan to the board without a conventional grading system.

There will be no faculty ranks at Arizona International--all will be called "professors." But there will be three salary levels, based on experience.

Faculty members will not be offered tenure--assurance of job security after a probationary period--but instead will be signed to three-to-five-year contracts.

"Tenure is a pernicious system that breeds laziness," Clausen said. "If you're doing your job, you'll get a multi-year contract renewal."

Doing away with tenure is popular with the Board of Regents, which tried unsuccessfully to abolish it throughout Arizona's public higher education system a year ago, but even faculty members who are sympathetic to the new campus think the no-tenure policy is a mistake.

"Tenure is very important for protecting academic freedom and for recruiting a solid faculty," said Edward Williams, a veteran political science professor on the main campus and supporter of Arizona International. "It is even more important in these days of growing nativism. I teach U.S.-Mexican relations and there are many issues I might not want to discuss in these times without the protection of tenure."

Fernandez, the executive vice president and provost, is the only member of the new college's faculty and staff to have tenure, which he gained as a faculty member at the University of Arizona and has declined to give up.

"I think it's outrageous that Celestino has tenure while other members of the faculty and staff do not," Professor Williams said. "I've told him he should give it up."

Fernandez disagrees. "I was hired under certain conditions," he said. "I fulfilled my side of the bargain. I'm still employed by the University of Arizona and the Arizona International Campus is still part of the university. If the conditions of faculty service change at the University of Arizona, then mine will, too."

The origins of the new campus are to be found in a 1990 Board of Regents report projecting an increase of 55,000 students in Arizona's four-year institutions by the year 2010. Later, that date was extended to 2015.

As predicted, enrollment has increased at Arizona State University, where almost 47,000 students now attend classes on the main campus in Tempe, next door to Phoenix, and at two branch campuses--"ASU East" and "ASU West." But enrollment at the University of Arizona, in Tucson, has remained stable at about 35,000 for the last six years.

"Under those circumstances I didn't see, and a lot of legislators didn't see, why we needed a new campus in the Tucson area," said John J. Lee, associate director of the Joint Legislative Budget Committee.

But Arizona politics, and the rivalry between Tucson and Phoenix, the state's major population center, came into play. Key regents and legislators insisted that Tucson and surrounding Pima County must have something to match the two Arizona State branch campuses. That "something" turned out to be the Arizona International Campus.

"The parochialism in this state is amazing," Lee said.

The 1990 Board of Regents report also stressed the need for smaller campuses that would focus on undergraduate education. Deliberations by a Community Advisory Committee and later an Academic Planning Advisory Committee, made up largely of University of Arizona faculty members who were sympathetic to the new college idea, refined that general notion into the plan for Arizona International.

"This was just a dream for me," said Gary D. Fenstermacher, a former professor of education on the main campus and chairman of the academic advisory committee. "I wanted to do John Dewey...I hoped the state of Arizona would commit itself to a small, quality undergraduate experience for everybody."

Most of the early planning assumed the new campus would be in or near downtown Tucson. Instead, it has opened in a research park owned by the University of Arizona, 15 miles southeast of downtown. There is no public transportation to the site.

A leased van carries a dozen students between the research park and their rooms on the main campus. The rest get there by automobile.

Because Hughes Missile Systems, a neighbor in the research park, does classified military work, students must show photo identification cards to security guards to gain access to the campus.

"The location is a catastrophe," Williams said. "The benign explanation is that we had this white elephant on our hands (the research park) and we had to do something with it."

A less benign explanation, offered on a not-for-attribution basis by a top Arizona higher education official, is that "very powerful interests wanted the campus to be part of the development of southeast Pima County and made sure the new campus went to the research park."

Arizona International will lease space in the park for the first few years, but the Board of Regents also has set aside 100 acres for a possible permanent campus.

"Site selection is always a political process," Executive Vice President Fernandez said. "My job is to make the campus work, wherever it is located."