Sun Country Culture

Sun Country CultureArizona's Community Colleges

On a typical Arizona copper-colored day parking lots jam up and hundreds of classrooms fill across the state. Classes for the old and young, retired and working, residents and winter visitors will meet on college campuses, in borrowed and leased buildings, fire stations, churches, libraries, public schools and community centers wherever there is space to accommodate nearly 120,000 community college students. Arizonans, it would appear from the statistics, have a greater commitment to higher education than citizens of any other state. For more Arizonans are full-time students per 1000 population than in any other state of the Union.

Essentially, community colleges are educational institutions designed to develop people according to individual and regional needs, rather than to per-petuate and protect intellectual tradi-tion based on European ideals the time-honored mission of the univer-sities.

The community college is a 20th century invention, created in response to changing social and economic dynamics, and intended to provide life-long learning for adults, and to serve as manpower training centers for 83 per cent of American citizens who work at jobs requiring the specialized skills of an advanced technological society.

At present, nine counties in Arizona support 14 community colleges on 22 campuses and approximately 400 off-campus locations.

From the beginning in Arizona it was clear that all the colleges within the system must be dedicated to the same objectives, but, in realizing common goals, must be permitted relative autonomy to accommodate the needs of rural, suburban and urban areas with differing demographics and industries. As a result, each college has become a sensitive barometer of its local environment, measuring individual and collective wants, which it attempts to satisfy with appropriate courses of study recommended by its district (county) board of directors. Uniform standards throughout the system, guaranteeing accreditation, are maintained by a governing state board of directors.From the approximately 2,700 courses offered collectively by the colleges, those special to Arizona include Indian languages and cultural studies, bilingual studies, the history and archeology of the Southwest, geology of Arizona, wildlife management, lapidary and jewelry-making, mining technologies, botany of the Southwest, desert biology and animal science, of which 19 courses alone are devoted to Arizona's favorite animal the horse.

What makes the community colleges typically Arizonan, however, is the extent to which the geographical, economic and cultural features that determine Arizona life styles permeate the community college curricula.

Since most of the state's inhabitants reside in Maricopa County, the county supports five community colleges and leases hundreds of off-campus locations, to reach the more than one million people concentrated in greater-Phoenix or scattered over 9,000 sq. mi.

In Phoenix, two colleges lie within the inner city and offer education to urban students in contrasting styles.

Phoenix College, founded in 1920 and located on a gracious 52-acre campus, is the senior of the two, and wellknown for its rigorous academic curriculum. The College has recently received national attention for its experimental individualized computerinstruction service known as TICCIT, a program unique to Phoenix College and only one other community college in the nation. As many as 128 students can be instructed simultaneously with individual mini-computers programmed with math and English courses, each computer console connected to a conventional TV screen.

Among its community services, Phoenix College offers a free series of book reviews, concerts and films, and operates a center for women to explore new career options and receive counseling, and a mobile nursing unit that carries instruction to nurses in convalescent homes, to improve the standards of patient care.

A few miles across town, housed on seven floors of an old department store, is one of the most energetic and enterprising of community colleges, Maricopa Technical Community College.

south, by acting as a non-political advisor and mediator between local and Mexican small-business interests. Bilingual programs and seminars have helped local entrepreneurs learn Spanish commercial expressions and facts about monetary exchange, advertising and promotion techniques, to the advantage of businessmen and consumer alike, on both sides of the border.

An historic community college, founded in 1888 by Mormon pioneers and deeded to Graham County in 1933, is located in Thatcher. There, in a bucolic valley watered by the Gila River, Eastern Arizona College courts the past and the future beneath the shifting shadows of Mt. Graham, one of Arizona's most spectacular mountains, rising to 11,000 feet. Agricultural courses attract both the neophyte and old hand in a peaceful farming and ranching community. Like Cochise, the area is rich in history and the remains of ancient civilizations.

Yuma has been one of Arizona's most thriving cities, ever since its days as a booming trading post on the westward migratory route to California, during the Gold Rush. Originally known as Colorado City, Yuma today is a sprawling complex on the western border of the state, known as the sunniest place in America. It is home to a resident population of 34,000, many thousands of winter visitors, and Arizona Western College the county's community college, which sits atop a mesa to the east of the city, commanding views of the Kofa and Chocolate mountains in the distance, and of the well-tilled fer-tile fields in the beautiful valley below.

The county's economy is based on farming, cattle feeding, tourism and government industries, all of which are reflected in the design of Arizona Western's broad curriculum. Courses are carried to every corner of the 10,000-square-mile county, many to employees at the Yuma Proving Grounds, a large U.S. Government installation, via its bilingual, nationalnetwork radio station operating 365 days a year North of Yuma, along the Colorado River and stretching from Lake Mead to the Utah border, is Mohave County, the second largest in Arizona. Though largely desert, it boasts over 1,000 miles of shoreline, the London Bridge and a piece of the Grand Canyon. With a county population density of 2.8 people per square mile, for an area of more than 13,000 square miles, the problem of providing educational services can only be daunting. Three community college centers were opened in 1971 in Lake Havasu City, Bullhead City and Kingman. Mohave Community College is a haven for hundreds of active winter visitors and retired citizens who receive feewaivers once they have passed sixtytwo years of age. One recent student in a creative writing course was ninetyseven years old and may well have been the oldest student in the West.

At Peach Springs, on the Hualapai Indian Reservation, 187 students enrolled in the spring of 1976 for general education and vocational courses, a surprisingly large proportion of the 870 residents, when only 380 were of college age. A full-time director for the Hualapai-Havasupai Adult Education Program is stationed at the headquarters at Peach Springs and coordinates programs for both Mohave and Yavapai Community Colleges.

Prescott, in Yavapai County, had the first public school in Arizona Territory, the first organized rodeo - ever - anywhere, on July 4, 1888, and was the training site for Teddy Roosevelt's Rough Riders. It is also the home of the county's community college, Yavapai College, which is the cultural center of the town, although it sits on the fringe, surrounded by rolling hills and pine forests, in full view of Tom's Butte.

It is one of Yavapai's amazing achievements that, along with educating its own citizenry, it has managed to provide more than one hundred off-campus courses to residents of Coco-nino County, which does not have a community college. That means covering a territory of more than 26,000 square miles, an area approximately the size of Ireland or twice the size of Massachusetts and Connecticut combined.

For retired residents Yavayai has a college division known as Retirement College, with a full syllabus of courses, free of charge to men over sixty-five and women over sixty-two, designed with their special interests in mind and conducted during daylight hours.

Indian studies, including Navajo, Apache and Havasupai languages; women's studies in history and the arts, and diesel and mining courses are specialties of the college. However, few can (Left) Phoenix College, founded in 1920, is a blend of old and new styles of architecture, uniquely suited to its site in the heart of this thriving southwestern metropolis. Gill C. Kenny

(Below) A 'light in the desert' theme of white buildings contrasted with dark rocky hills at the base of Signal Peak is the setting for Central Arizona College in Coolidge. The unique style is further complimented by desert greenery: giant saguaro, cholla, mesquite and palo verde. Gill C. Kenny (Below, right) The wide open spaces of the Scottsdale Community College, to the east of Phoenix, enhance the Indian-inspired architecture of the school, situated on land leased from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community. Gill C. Kenny To compete with the range of art courses for which the college is duly noted.

A breathless drive across the Mingus Mountains, spiraling down past the cliffside ghost town of Jerome, leaving you speechless before the spectacle of encircling mountains rising rosy-red beyond a broad valley, brings you to the Verde Valley campus of Yavapai College, forty miles from Prescott. The attractive modern campus near Clarkdale houses administrative offices for a network of programs carried to Jerome, Clarkdale, Cottonwood, Lake Montezuma, Rimrock and Sedona. A wealth of talent exists in these communities, especially among retired residents who can't bear being idle and relish teaching as a new career.

East of Yavapai, in northeastern Arizona, is a long, narrow county touching the Utah border on the north and reaching south beyond the median line across the state. The Mogollon Rim divides Navajo County roughly in half, into arid desert country to the north and rugged mountains heavily wooded with piñon, juniper and ponderosa pine to the south. Seventy per cent of the county contains Indian reservations for the Navajo, Hopis and Apache. Much of the county is wild and starkly beautiful. Straight as the crow flies it is 225 miles from north to south; but the irregularity of the terrain requires driving 300 miles to cover the same distance the crow flies. The largest settlement has less than 9,000 people; the entire county only 56,000. To serve these residents, the county organized Northland Pioneer College as four mini-centers in Holbrook, Winslow, Show Low and Snowflake, without a centralized campus. It would be different from Mohave County's operation, in that it would use as many mobile facilities as possible to transport labs, libraries and equipment from one location to another. It is, after all, not a county with an excess of revenues. In its first semester, fall 1974, NPC enrolled 2,010 students. This was roughly three times the number projected, which required using a conglomeration of buildings once intended for a civic center, business offices, gas station, BIA dormitories and community hospital. In only two years the college has expanded to sixty-six buildings, hardly elegant but functional and, at times, historic. An amazing array of courses is offered at NPC, reflecting the county's economic base of small businesses, timbering, ranching and mining. It's a nice irony that students consider a community college education such a bargain in terms of dollar-cost to them, forgetting (if they ever consider) theintangible costs to their instructors. Sometimes dedication is a write-off. But then things happen to lift the spirits, like the young woman whose husband had been transferred to Alaska. She tried to earn a degree from four different colleges, but got lost in the shuffle everywhere. Finally, last June, she graduated from NPC with an Associate's degree, and the first thing she did, upon learning of her husband's transfer, was to inquire if there was a community college near their new post in Alaska (yes, there is, Kodiak Community College). Perhaps the community colleges are doing something right, something valuable and imperishable for us all.