Northern Arizona University

NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY WITH A CAMPUS AS BIG AS ALL OUTDOORS

There are universities and there are universities in this and other countries, but we doubt any university, any place, is situated in an area so rich in scenery, so magnificently endowed in natural wonders as is Northern Arizona University (formerly Arizona State College) in Flagstaff.

When we say N.A.U. has a campus as big as all outdoors, we feel we are not exaggerating or resorting to far-fetched and starry-eyed hyperbole. Anyone familiar with the area within, let us say, a short day's drive or even a few hours' hike from N.A.U., will understand another's enthusiastic use of the gaudiest of adjectives in describing it.

In claiming this area as part of its campus (and it is perfectly justified in doing so), Northern Arizona University has more to offer its students than the sometimes musty and dusty knowledge found in books. Here the student finds himself part of a living textbook, intimately rubbing shoulders with such learned sciences as archaeology, anthropology, geology, biology, zoology, astronomy, meteorology, and history, just to name a few.

Eloquent evidence of past civilizations can be studied at N.A.U. in such prehistoric ruins as Wupatki, Walnut Canyon, Montezuma Castle, Tuzigoot, and in Navajo and Canyon de Chelly National Monuments where ancient dwellings, carefully preserved, bespeak the life and times of a people who lived in the land over a thousand years ago. And all of this mind you, less than a day away from N.A.U.'s shaded campus.

A student at N.A.U., in just a few hours from his classroom, can study at first hand the story of earth many milleniums before man came to clutter up the scenery. Grand Canyon, the grandest canyon of them all, tells perhaps, the most vivid geological who-dun-it yarn of this rollicking sphere that can be found anywhere. And all in big, bold letters!

In Petrified Forest National Park, the story there is the story of ancient times when the seas covered the earth. Meteor Crater reminds the student that our planet can be a target of celestial missiles, and Sunset Crater tells of times when fire possessed the earth.Then, perhaps, most important of all, is the closeness of N.A.U. to the Navajo, Hopi and Havasupai Indian Reservations. Here the student is practically rubbing shoulders with a people in many ways similar, in many ways different from his own people. That very closeness, with understanding, sensitivity, and mutual respect, benefits all. When the student leaves, his own life is enriched by what he has seen, and by people he has met in his wanderings through the big, beautiful, strange and lonely land - the campus of N.A.U.

Unforgettable moments in the days of a Lumberjack's (and Lumberjills) years.

Ancient logging rig is the traditional Lumberjack "royal coach"

Its 4-season informality on "the big as all outdoors" campus

The Phoenix editorial grudgingly acknowledged the fact that the building did exist and ought to be put to some use: "Either turn it into a summer school or college, or, possibly better still, sell it to some speculators to be used as a hotel: better dispose of the structure as a sheep house than to keep it where it cannot be used profitably to the territory." Funston concluded his observation on these remarks by urging Arizona to eschew regional bickering, strife and corruption, and concentrate on what was good for the future state. In so many words he implied: What's good for Flagstaff is good for Arizona.On January 16, 1899, Governor N. O. Murphy suggested to the Twentieth Legislature that since there was minimal need for a reformatory, the building ought to be sold or put to use as a normal school.

One of Arizona's most colorful statesmen, Henry F. Ashurst, then twenty-four, introduced House Bill 41 on February 6, 1899. The bill allowed for the establishment of the Northern Arizona Normal School. With limp discussion and no debate, the entire legislature granted approval and the bill swiftly passed. Northern Arizona University was on its way.

The first graduating class, comprised of young ladies, received diplomas in 1901: a grand total of four. Their diplomas were life certificates to teach in the schools of Arizona. The Normal School very sensibly adapted itself to fulfilling its function, and future teachers graduated in respectable numbers. For some years after the school was opened, there persisted a soupçon of irritation in the Legislature. There were still many who viewed the enterprise as folly. The arguments against the school were meager at best, and as the years rolled on the objections were found lacking in persuasion. Finally they gave way to realization that the school was in Flagstaff to stay.

During the roaring '20's the Normal School at Tempe pressed for a designation as a teachers' college. This meant the institute would offer a four-year course that would terminate with a degree in education. The petition was backed by sound reasoning, for one bill interesting the Legislature aimed at giving preferential consideration to the graduates of the University of Arizona in the matter of high school nool teaching assignments. Thus, graduates of a normal school would be restricted to instructing in elementary grades. Some states were already refusing to honor the normal school certificates for teaching. A bill was introduced to make the institutes at Tempe and Flagstaff teachers' colleges. The authority to grant the Bachelor of Education degree was naturally included. When word reached the campus that the Governor had put his name to the Legislature's approval, there was a torchlight parade through downtown Flagstaff.

In 1925 the school officially became Northern Arizona State Teachers College, in 1928 Arizona State Teachers College at Flagstaff. Interested chroniclers were beginning to think that keeping matters straight was no simple task. Eight years later the college was granted the right to establish courses carrying graduate credit, and thus the degree of Master of Arts in Education appeared. In 1945 yet another name change, this time to Arizona State College at Flagstaff. More and more students were attracted to the campus known best as the spot "Where the Nation gathers for Summer School." Over the ensuing years, new degrees found catalogue mention. (Currently, plans for doctoral programs are under way.) On November 28, 1964, the regents unanimously consented to a change in status for Arizona State College. Henceforth it would be Northern Arizona University. With this culmination that single building, Old Main, which had caused such furor at the turn of the century, emerges like something Dr. Lowell might have discovered beyond the range of his telescope.

Northern Arizona University (three other names had been considered: State University of Arizona at Flagstaff, Arizona University at Flagstaff, University of Northern Arizona) now boasts four colleges and three schools: College of Arts and Sciences, College of Education, College of Business Administration, College of Creative Arts, School of Forestry, School of Applied Science and Technology, and the School of Graduate Study.

The construction that has gone on within recent years has been, and continues to be, dramatic. A new nine-story dormitory for men to house 600 students, a new library building, a new liberal arts center, over a score and ten major and minor buildings.

Director of Publicity, Melvin Hutchinson, recalls that in 1951 he talked on campus with Dr. L. B. McMullen, who was the college president from 1920 to 1925. Dr. McMullen took a hard look at the new work that was then in progress, a three-million dollar program. "You know," he said to Hutchinson, "I left here because I thought everything had been done."

Today the hunger of the hammer and nail would make even this gentle astonishment obsolete.

Like so much in Arizona, the University has lived close to both continuity and change. Acceleration has often been marked by the fear that things were happening too fast. Can so many students swelling the rolls be intelligently absorbed into university life?

President J. Lawrence Walkup speaking: "A new administrative structure will be required. We now function under the same administrative structure and academic staff as when the college had well below one thousand students enrolled. To fulfill our aims properly, we need approximately eighteen additional departments, increased personnel and adequate funds, as well as an administrative structure commensurate to best serve faculty and students.

"Our sister institutions have provided a much needed and welcomed academic climate in Arizona. They have the leadership, the facilities, and the funds to provide a valuable service, not only to the student but to Arizona and the nation. The fast-developing junior college system has helped round out our educational program.

"The proposed academic program for Northern Arizona University complements rather than competes with those of the two established universities, and will serve to widen the base of the state's educational position."

Arizona's newest university offers a direct confrontation to the "mass school," where the individual is lost in a world of I.B.M. cards, bigness, and specialization seldom divided in purpose.

What direction for growth will the new university take in the future?

President Walkup: "Our philosophy is not new . . . our direction is not novel, and our academic program of growth is unique only in that it differs from the paths now established by the present two universities. We embrace a credo of the teacher-scholar philosophy that emphasizes the humanistic values of education more than the precipitant levels of research, an integration of knowledge, rather than early specialization, all functioning under the tradi tional university structure."

Unlike the universities at Tempe and Tucson, where thousands of students are within easy driving distance, NAU serves undergraduates who, for the most part, live on campus. Controlled growth, therefore, is based on dormitory space rather than parking space. On campus there are accommodations for married students in what is known as "Cottage City," a subdivision of two-room stone and frame apartments and "Campus Heights," another area boasting multipurpose units. Incidentally, the campus streets are named after former teachers and employees.

One local resident summed it up this way: "Well, you take Flagstaff. It's a small town up in the mountains naturally the college students come to live. It's their town. Just like the town is part of the University."

This outlook and set of circumstances grant Flagstaff a cultural existence out of proportion to its size. Whether it be a Symphony Orchestra, or a committee to publicize the town's famed Indian Pow Wow, the university is always well represented.

N.A.U. BRONZE CASTING FOUNDRY

Art students enrolled at N.A.U. have a unique opportunity, in Arizona, to learn first-hand the complete process of bronze casting by the lost wax method.

The art department at N.A.U. is the only one on an Arizona campus that has a foundry and can complete the process from the first clay model to the pouring of the bronze. The foundry, constructed by art instructor Winthrop Williams Jr., has a melting furnace with a 200-pound capacity, a burnout furnace, electric hoist, and a 390 amp. tungsten inert gas welder for joining sections of larger bronze sculptures. Since the foundry was put in operation in 1963, hundreds of sculptures have been cast in cast metal sculpture class offered at the school.

Other classes offered by Williams include clay modeling, anatomy, figure modeling, wood carving, stone carving, welded metal sculpture.

If a symbol stands to signify Northern Arizona University it unquestionably is the new library. Its role outreaches the virtue of a community asset. Since NAU is a comprehensive, medium-scope university, building its reputation on a strong emphasis for the combination of arts and sciences, the library has ever-increasing responsibility in keeping apace.

Sure to delight historians and researchers is the Special Collections Section under the supervision of Curator James Fraser. Oddly enough, despite being close to the frontier, Northern Arizona never shared the Southwest's fetish for preserving its memorabilia; at least not to the same extent as other locales. Possibly the lack of a suitable repository was the rub. Now that is changed. Curator Fraser is perpetually engaged in seeking out old diaries, ranch, timber, military and school records, reminiscences of early settlers, anything printed in and on Arizona prior to 1945, with emphasis on material that relates directly to the Northland.

Some noteworthy collections, the papers of Senator Hochderffer, the Saginaw and Manistee Lumber Co. records, First National Bank of Arizona records, the United Verde Mines purchasing records; Charles Dunning manuscripts and papers; Apache Tribal materials; Frances Munds diaries and papers; George Babbitt collection of Western Americana; James and Thomas Pitts collection; Cordes Family collection; Thomas Frier collection; J. Lee and Leland Loveless collection; Norman Allderdice collec-tion; and Martin Buggeln papers and company records. A monograph publishing program is in proposal. The Special Collections Section is bound to attract innumerable scholars in much the same manner that the Lowell Observatory once generated academic response.

Buildings, books, even students and faculty cannot a university make. As Dr. Walkup points out: "In the West, some seem to have lost sight of the traditional uni-versity pattern. They believe that, because most universi-ties have large enrollments and many specialized profes-sional schools, all universities must follow this pattern . . . they have forgotten that these institutions limit their pro-fessional schools to three to five areas and build their reputations in these areas which draw students to the general college of arts and science on the basis of the prestige developed in these limited areas, as well as the success of the students who transfer to the large multi-versities to do professional work not offered at the smaller institutions.

"The teacher-scholar environment requires opportunity for research in a changing society. However, addition of research to a scholarly environment is not done with the intention of developing research at the expense of instruction or to develop the philosophy of the 'publish or perish' policy which has been successfully used to develop institutions famous for their research. The student will remain at the center of this institution's objective."

This concept, once the hallmark of higher education, has naturally lessened under the weight of rising enrollment, frequently alienating the student from the feeling that he is part of his university and vice versa.

The dignity of the student and scholar occupies much thought at the new university. So much so that five years ago the faculty decided to dramatize their concern. On the main thoroughfare, a plaque anchored to stone reads, in part: "We (the faculty) dedicate ourselves to maintain the highest standard of professional efficiency in a campus atmosphere of scholarship and friendliness. Furthermore, we feel that, within and without the classroom, the line of communication between the student and the faculty must be kept open, and the individuality of the student must be preserved."

Over half a century has passed since that crusading Flagstaff newspaper referred to what is now Northern Arizona University as "one of the youngest but one of the most promising of all western schools."

The observation has spanned more than one era, and today it represents most eloquently an aspiration that has terminated in reality. For Arizona, the impact of its newest university is bound to be historic.

story and photography by DARWIN VAN CAMPEN Red Mountain

Another reminder of the days when fire possessed the earth