Prescott College

For the Liberal Arts and the Environment' PRESCOTT COLLEGE

What, as old riddles go, do the following people have in common? Grass-roots organizer Dick Kamp, whose lobbying led to the world's first international-air-quality treaty; Diana Papoulias, who designed and built a fish farm for the world's biggest orphanage; Howard Lyon, former Peace Corps director in Guatemala; Kent Madin and Linda Svendsen,

whose San Diego-based Boojum Institute reopened mainland China to wilderness exploration; Rosilda Manuel, education director for the Tohono O'odham (Papago) Indian tribe; Chris Duvall, founder of a rural credit union in Honduras; Gary Paul Nabhan, winner of the 1986 Burroughs Medal for Nature Writing; Kim Cliffton, acknowledged by the Mexican government to have saved the Pacific green sea turtle from extinction; John Annerino, author of Sierra Club Books field guides.... The list could continue through Antarctic researchers, attorneys for various public causes, and several noteworthy photog raphers, scientists, and educators. The answer is not merely that they all are alumni of Arizona's tiny Prescott College, but that many of these accomplishments either began or were actually completed while they were still Prescott undergraduates. Yet were it not for the Prescott faculty's obstinate refusal to abandon the college's ideals during a struggle for survival unprecedented in American higher education, this roster of accomplished young adults might not still be growing today. College students are frequently heard to grumble that education in massive universities most closely resembles a cattle drive, and lately professors retort that enrollees in their classes seem more concerned with wallets than wisdom. But at Prescott College, a private, four-year liberal arts institution of 210 students (with about 300 more in an adult extension program) in the central Arizona mountain town of the same name, both students and faculty have only themselves to blame if learning ever gets tedious. Last year alone, Prescott collegians headed to the Sea of Cortez to study marine life and the local economies that depend on it; examined alpine ecology in the high Rockies; trekked through England's Lake District to savor more deeply the writings of William Wordsworth; tested for industrial pollution in international watersheds along the United States border with Mexico; encamped on Arizona's Mogollon Rim to contemplate Native American perceptions of nature; retreated with writing tools to an isolated mountain cabin to emulate Thoreau; circumnavigated Tiburon Island in sea kayaks; and conducted a cultural survey of the Baja California peninsula. And those were routine classes. Individual advanced students, meanwhile, were independently immersed in documentary photography in Central America, agriculture in Italy, environmental technology in Bermuda, literature in Mexico, ornithology in Australia, and human rights in Chile. Others were scattered throughout the U.S. but particularly in Arizona, involved in research or internships ranging from counseling runaways in crisisintervention centers to geological expeditions through the Grand Canyon. When student Kiyo Taylor, who plans a career in range management, returned from a sixmonth horseback tour of the southern half of the state, she and her companion, PC graduate Kate Beardsley, spoke in awed tones of the landscape and the ranches they'd encountered-"and the Prescott College people. They're everywhere." Some are even on campus, often in seminars taught not by a single professor but rather some unusual combination of two or more. Economist and political

Students in a Prescott College outdoor leadership

class run Colorado River rapids deep in the Grand Canyon.

(ABOVE, LEFT) Practicing a technique used in rock climbing, student Leah Day edges along the back wall of the historic building that is the Prescott College headquarters.

(ABOVE) Students of human ecology rest during a hike up Baboquivari Peak, overlooking the Sonoran Desert expanse of the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation.

(LEFT) Instructor Rusty Bailie reads Tennyson to help inspire an outdoor education and recreation class before its members tackle the challenging Diamond Creek run on the Colorado.

scientist Sandra Voelker notes with some amazement that during her first four years on Prescott's faculty she co-taught Jeffersonian philosophy with an agricultural biologist, Marxism with a historian, environmental economics with a naturalist, and U.S.-Mexico relations with a working journalist. With classes averaging fewer than 10 students, such cross-disciplinary approaches and the fieldwork opportunities add up, she is convinced, “to undergraduate experiences that usually occur only at the master's or doctoral level if at all.” In 1963 a Ford Foundation conference held in Phoenix challenged 100 of the country's top educators, businessmen, and scientists to design an ideal “college of the 21st century.” In the model they envisioned, students would not merely sit in classrooms reading about someone else's experiences but would spend up to half their time in the field in direct contact with their subjects. Traditional barriers between academic disciplines would dissolve, encouraging students and faculty to explore the relationships linking, for example, mathematics and poetics, or business and biology. Graduation would depend not just on a total of accumulated grades and credits, but on a demonstration of professional competence in a student's major field.

The notion was so fascinating that within three years a group of the original conferees founded just such an institution on a breezy 620-acre campus north of Prescott. Even the role of sports was reconsidered: instead of intercollegiate competition favoring a handful of male athletes, all incoming freshman would take part in a rigorous three-week wilderness orientation patterned after Outward Bound, a program in which participants journey up mountains and down canyons to test their mettle and confront the primeval roots of human consciousness. They would thus become acquainted with the natural terrain of the Southwest that would be their laboratory and classroom, and also taste the satisfaction of pushing themselves beyond their preconceived limits. This proved so successful that an entire outdoor-education curriculum developed; today, many current and former Prescott students populate the faculties of U.S. Outward Bound schools and have designed similar programs in colleges and secondary schools throughout the country.

By 1974 Prescott's innovations had been featured in Time, The World Book, Parade, National Wildlife, and in a CBS “On the Road” sequence. But in their zeal to turn their concept into reality, the college authorities did not foresee the rising interest rates that steadily pushed mortgage payments on the new campus beyond reach. As debts outstripped resources and income, the school faced bankruptcy. Just before Christmas that year, the Prescott community was shocked to learn that the college must close. Dedicated faculty members vowed to reincorporate, continuing to teach out of their own living rooms, if necessary; but the forced closing of the campus also automatically terminated the college's accreditation, and the following September barely 30 students appeared. The so-called alternative school found itself re-creating an educational tradition

as old as Aristotle and Socrates: professors and students gathering under the trees to discover together the meaning of their surroundings. Despite the hardships, there was something so appealing in this that Prescott's faculty decided to hang on and reinitiate the long process toward accreditation. After two years, they literally resurfaced, moving from makeshift quarters in a hotel basement to a historic former convent they purchased and gradually restored. Meanwhile a steady trickle of students, who heard of the school largely by word of mouth, kept coming in search of a learning atmosphere that emphasized their individuality. Despite a threadbare budget and salaries that were symbolic at best, the Prescott faculty's commitment to creative education managed to produce memorable curricula: an archeological quest that used infrared Skylab imagery to uncover a significant pre-Columbian site north of Phoenix; a Spanish literature class that journeyed to Spain to trace, on horseback, Don Quixote's route through La Mancha; an ongoing search-and-rescue course whose skilled mountaineers saved several lives. Like a forest springing back after a fire, the school and its reputation-grew again. Finally, in 1984, the North Central Association of Colleges and Schools re-awarded Prescott College accreditation at the highest level-the only time in anyone's memory that such an academic resurrection has occurred in the United States. Danny Lopez, a 52-year-old student teacher at Indian Oasis Primary School on the Tohono O'odham Indian Reservation west of Tucson, likes to tell His pupils stories. Often he weaves old O'odham legends of struggle and triumph with his own experiences, relating how after so many years his dream of completing his college degree is finally coming true. The attrition rate of Native Americans attending U.S. colleges and universities is at least 75 percent, and Lopez had been one of the discouraged dropouts. Then his tribe learned of the extension program Prescott College had designed for adults, based on the European model of individualized tutorial learning. Could Prescott, tribal officials asked, bring college to Indians who want to become teachers, without forcing them into an urban university setting?

In five years, Prescott College's Center for Indian Bilingual Teacher Training has already reversed the odds-graduating more than 75 percent of its first O'odham enrollees-and the program is spreading to other Arizona tribes. To his youngsters, Danny Lopez points out Baboquivari, the sacred mountain that hovers above their land. “We stumble on our way up,” he tells them, “but the day I earn my teaching degree, I'm going all the way to the top.” Over on Baboquivari's slopes, a group of PC students is doing just that. It is a course entitled Human Ecology, led by British geographer and mountaineer Michael Goff and anthropologist Dana Oswald. From their lofty perch, they can see the effects of various human cultures on terrain stretching clear into Mexico, and they discuss the comparative advantages and drawbacks of traditional Tohono O'odham flood irrigation, Mexican cooperative farming, and modern agribusiness technology. This is the first time these two They have taught together. The previous year, Goff and students skied across northern Norway and Sweden, studying the Chernobyl disaster's impact on crops and the economically crucial reindeer herds. For Oswald, a course like this means coming full circle. Back in the 1960s, as a student in Prescott College's charter class, she worked on the Navajo Indian Reservation in a major archeological research project at Black Mesa.

She didn't realize it at the time, but her undergraduate fieldwork there would eventually form the basis of her doctoral dissertation. After serving as director of ethnoarcheology in a South African museum, she decided she missed teaching. She seized a chance to return to Prescott College where she could involve students the way her own Prescott professors had motivated her.

Two decades after her own graduation, her alma mater has like the rivers its students cherish so-followed a natural course: Prescott College now finds itself committed not simply to a process but to an all-embracing theme. “For the Liberal Arts and the Environment,” reads the motto of the school that has always encouraged its students to balance their library hours with regular encounters with nature. The intent is not to turn everyone into a professional ecologist. “From now on,” explains educational psychologist Jim Stuckey, “the future of the environment is inextricable from the future of everything else. The world can no longer ignore it. We want our students not just to appreciate the planet, but to be respon-sible to it. So environmental considerations seep into Prescott College's curriculum in unexpected ways. Sociologist Steven DeMocker is struck to hear his students arguing passionately against the legaliza tion of drugs because their cultivation is destroying rain forests. Jean Schmitt, a young woman from Michigan on her way to art school, detours to Prescott for a year to study form in nature. To artist col-leagues who wonder why she is hanging out in deserts and riparian forests engrossed in birdlife and hydrology instead of in a studio, she replies simply that "the tools naturalists use open my senses." In Sandra Voelker's classes, the hot question involves how to work with, not against, industry, by reorienting economic systems to make environmental protection profitable.

Each spring Prescott College professor Douglas Hulmes' environmental educa-tion class takes children from the Prescott public school system on weekly trips: up into the area's magnificent granite out-croppings, down along walnutand cottonwood-lined mountain streams, into the freshly blooming desert-and, to help them understand their own place in the ecosystem, to landfills and sewage treat-ment plants. Miller Valley School fifth-grade teacher Moira Patterson's class has been participating for the last nine years: she needed no convincing of the pro-gram's importance because, as a Prescott College graduate, she too was once Hulmes' student. "To bring the world around, you have to start with kids. It's hard to get 40-year-olds to change their ways," she says as she watches her class and Hulmes' exam-ining invertebrates along the banks of Granite Creek. She reflects on the fact that four scholastic generations are repre-sented here: Hulmes, herself, his students, and hers. A geometrical progression is taking place, spreading Prescott College's concerned philosophy beyond its walls-beyond borders even, for Hulmes has an invitation for the next class he takes to the Sea of Cortez to begin an environ-mental education program in primary schools in the Mexican state of Sonora. "Two countries, one ecological com-munity," he tells his charges at the shore of that extraordinary body of water, bio-logically one of the world's richest, whose lifeblood was the Colorado River until the United States and Mexico diverted its flow to vegetable fields and ever-growing cities. "To truly understand this sea means understanding Mexican and North Amer-ican policies that decide how much nutrient-bearing fresh water reaches it, and how Mexico's foreign debt deter-mines how much fish they capture from it to sell to the United States. To figure out how to cooperate with our neighbors to preserve it, you'll need to study the history of U.S.-Mexico relations. And know the current state of diplomatic affairs. And probably learn Spanish."

PRESCOTT COLLEGE

He pauses, watching the complexity he's described sink in. The students look a little boggled, but dolphins are jumping and ospreys are wheeling over the heads of the fishermen bringing in their catch, and everyone is excited at the prospect of grasping all this.

"Everything is related," Hulmes tells them. "See why we put it all together at Prescott College?"

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