EDUCATION

A 'PUBLIC COLLEGE WITH AN IVY TWIST' NORTHERN ARIZONA UNIVERSITY

One of those intriguing findings that emerge now and then from otherwise tedious academic studies maintained the Hopi people of northeastern Arizona have no words to express such fundamental concepts of time as "yesterday," "next year," or "later." The belief, espoused by noted American ethnolinguist Benjamin Lee Whorf, was accepted by academia for half a century. Whorf had come to the Southwest in the 1930s, studied the Hopis' Uto-Aztecan tongue and announced that for all its richness, the language nonetheless contained "no words, grammatical forms, constructions, or expressions that refer directly to what we call 'time.'"

ld Main, the original building on the Northern Arizona University campus, (PRECEDING PANEL, PAGES 4 AND 5) dates to 1899. (BELOW) Transplanted West German Ekkehart Malotki is an authority on the Hopi language. (BOTTOM) Retired Flagstaff newspaper publisher Platt Cline is a long-time supporter of Northern Arizona University; the school's library is named for him and his wife, Barbara. (ABOVE, RIGHT) President Eugene M. Hughes emphasizes undergraduate education and relatively small classes. (OPPOSITE PAGE) The San Francisco Peaks form a dramatic backdrop to the NAU campus; the J. Lawrence Walkup Skydome is in the right foreground.

Such a charming notion a timeless language for a timeless people. But sooner or later (as one could say even in Hopi, it turns out), someone was bound to come along and debunk it.

That unlikely someone was Ekkehart Malotki, a man born and educated in West Germany. Since the early 1970s, Malotki has kept his ears attuned to the dialect of the Hopis of Third Mesa. By 1983 he had published a 670-page monograph documenting the multitude of explicit references to time that he encountered in their language.

Having exploded one of the most persistent linguistic myths of the 20th century, Malotki went on to standardize a writing system for Hopi. He now is coauthoring what will be the language's first comprehensive dictionary.

It's all part of the job. Malotki is a professor of languages at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff. His work stands as but one example of the invaluable contributions to knowledge made on various fronts by NAU, the youngest and smallest of Arizona's three state universities. It typifies, too, how NAU emphasizes the understanding and preservation of Native American cultures.

Malotki's work also serves as a convenient metaphor for the university itself, a robust institution for which the time has come to shake off a few simpleminded myths somehow still clinging to it.

Northern Arizona University, the "little" upstate institution that, nestled below the imposing San Francisco Peaks, calls itself "The Mountain Campus," is now in its 25th year as a full-fledged university. It is far from little anymore not in size, scope, or accomplishment.

Descended from a two-year teacher-training school founded as an afterthought 91 years ago during territorial days, NAU is now distinguishing itself in fields as disparate as forestry and physical therapy, geology and hotel-restaurant management, education and ecology.

Its Old Main, built but never occupied as a reform school, then briefly considered but rejected for use as an insane asylum, has always fulfilled a higher destiny. Newly restored, it is becoming the showcase for a $1 million art collection bequeathed by the late Marguerite Hettel Weiss, a Phoenix teacher who never attended NAU but prized its goals and philosophies. The flying-saucerlike J. Lawrence Walkup Skydome featured the world's largest span of laminated-wood beams when it was built in 1977. Covering six acres, the dome houses a football field and complete track, and can seat 20,000. (While football has yet to be the Lumberjacks' best sport, teams in track and swimming are consistent standouts.) Even as NAU's reputation for quality grows, the school continues delivering so many classes and services so widely throughout rural Arizona that its leaders say NAU could lay claim more legitimately to being "the" state university than either of its two giant sisters in the metropolitan valleys to the south.

Most importantly, its champions say, Northern Arizona University has achieved maturity without giving up those special qualities lacking in today's impersonal world of mega-universities: a residential collegiate atmosphere emphasizing undergraduate education in which relatively small classes (the undergraduate average is 31) are taught mostly by professors themselves, not graduate assistants.

"We know we don't want to be a carbon copy of our sister institutions," says Eugene M. Hughes, now in his 12th year as NAU president. "Here, you have the kind of regular interaction between faculty and students that allows them to really get to know one another as human beings, not as numbers."

That view from the top is confirmed by students. Says sophomore Alton Williams, 20, a Navajo from a non-reservation family that sent four of his siblings to NAU before he entered the civil engineering program: "Here, the teachers know your name."

Among NAU's many sources of pride are a forestry school whose holistic view extends well beyond trees, lumber, and pulp; a radically modernized approach to preparing teachers by, for one thing, sending them into classrooms as early as their sophomore year; a focusing of many education, research, and service activities on

for minorities by NAU and the National Institutes of Health, students explore reservation villages for evidence of bacteria being transmitted from livestock to humans. NAU and the Lowell Observatory (where Pluto was discovered in 1930), conduct the National Undergraduate Research Laboratory in Astronomy.

The university's setting alone is inspirational. The Grand Canyon, Painted Desert, Petrified Forest, numerous Indian ruins, picturesque reservation lands, the red rock country of Sedona and Oak Creek Canyon, and the pine-aspen forests and ski slopes of the tallest peaks in Arizona are not just wonderments surrounding this academic enclave, but they also are its extended classrooms.

Where better to explore the geological past? Over eons, explosive volcanoes and Earthquakes, swirling oceans, mountain ranges, 2,000-foot-deep sand dunes, and, rarely, placid meadows and freshwater streams took their turns forging the Colorado Plateau, the high, arid intermountain region sprawling within boundaries that nearly reach to Salt Lake City, Denver, Albuquerque, and Phoenix.

Here amid the strata lie fossils as different as tiny sea creatures, the earliest dinosaurs, and the huge mammoths once hunted by men with spears.

Just as varied as the physical features have been the people inhabiting the plateau. At NAU's multidisciplinary Center for Colorado Plateau Studies, director Valeen Avery says with infectious enthusiasm, "Just look at the humanistic studies possible in the area. It's a natural!"

She depicts a cultural parade, starting Flagstaff's unpredictable weather often creates anomolies like this late spring snowstorm that spotted the NAU campus (LEFT). Forming a classic collegiate scene, ivy covers the walls of NAU's Blome Building (RIGHT), which houses the Human Resources Department. (FAR RIGHT) Graduating students from distant lands capture memories to take home.

with the indigenous pre-Columbian people and proceeding chronologically through Spanish conquistadors, a period of Mexican rule, early Mormon settlers, the gold rush, the Indian wars, statehood days, and continuing through the building of Hoover Dam in the 1930s.

Avery herself qualifies as one of the human-interest features of the region. She and a coauthor attracted not only three major book prizes for their biography of the wife of the founder of the Mormon Church, but also the wrath of the church for producing what it considered too human a profile of its patriarch. After Mormon Enigma: Emma Hale Smith was published in 1983, Mormons were ordered not to discuss anything historical with her.

The ban lasted a year. Undaunted, Avery is about to publish still another biography, this one on the youngest son of church founder Joseph Smith. "I never saw myself as a courageous academician," she says. "I was just doing my work."

Platt Cline, a retired Flagstaff newspaper publisher, has written two books about the university. The library named for him and his wife, Barbara, is undergoing a $16.6 million expansion.

He used to be an inveterate booster of growth for NAU, which generates more than half of the city's economic activity. Today, though, Cline has shifted gears. "Size isn't everything," he says. "We don't want to outgrow what's best about us. This is a campus of very good people - very good scholars who are also very good teachers."

A recurring theme of Cline's books is that while NAU is the sum of all those "very good" parts, its accomplishments since the late 1950s are attributable ultimately to just two men: J. Lawrence Walkup, president from 1957 through '79, and his successor, Eugene M. Hughes.

Walkup, whose memoirs fill a volume of his own about the school, was the academic builder through a period of phenomenal expansion. In the midst of overseeing a tenfold increase in student enrollment, he launched the school into university status in 1966.

Soon after taking charge of a college situated in the largest ponderosa pine forest in the world, Walkup pressed for creation of a School of Forestry as the institution's first foray beyond teacher training.

The idea didn't get the go-ahead, however, until the chairman of the powerful state Senate Appropriations Committee confronted a recalcitrant member of the Board of Regents who wanted the school in Tucson's desert. Grabbing him by the tie, the senator snarled that forestry would be taught where the trees grow — in Flagstaff, his home district.

There was no repeat of that woolly scene when NAU recently added three programs President Hughes thinks will be the final expansion of doctoral offerings. They will be in geology, English as a second language, and, fittingly, forestry.

Since the day Hughes took office and began picking up windblown trash during his daily jog across campus, it has been clear that "refinement" is a byword of this administration.

The president, a mathematician, grew up in Scottsbluff, Nebraska, during the Depression years. His father worked at a variety of odd jobs while the family lived for years in a two-room apartment. Hughes recalls that the farmer grandparents who helped raise him thought he should go to work, not college, after high school, but his mother pushed education.

Today the lesson is not lost on Hughes when he sees scores of young Indian students studying science, engineering, or the intricacies of modern business while some of their white middle-class contemporaries choose to delve into bygone Native American cultures.

Hughes points out that by the year 2000, one of every three persons in the nation will be nonwhite. For NAU, this prospect of cultural integration calls for "creative leadership and enthusiastic planning," he says. To that end, NAU has signed agreements with the Hopis and Navajos to provide educational and economic-development assistance.

NAU isn't perfect, Hughes concedes.

"The funding base is not at the level you would need to achieve quality in all aspects of the university," he says. That means, for instance, that the expanded library won't be fully stocked, and that special services for students who need academic help won't always be available.

Hughes says he wants NAU's diplomas to signify that its students are worldly wise.

"It's extremely important for our students to be able to think of this as a global society. Their lives are not just Flagstaff and Arizona anymore," says Hughes. We're so interdependent internationally, we've got to give them that perspective."

HANDS-ON COURSES TEACH HOSPITALITY MANAGEMENT

Every graduate of the School of Hotel and Restaurant Management at Northern Arizona University has received at least three job offers, a clear indication the relatively new program has been successful from the beginning.

"We operate on the principle of the '3 Ls' here," says Dean Peter Van Kleek.

"Lecture, laboratory practice, and live experience." This teaching philosophy allows the approximately 1,000 students to learn not only through classroom instruction but also by using the school's two computer laboratories and working in the "living lab," known as The Inn at NAU, a 17-suite hotel with two restaurants. Student interns and managers-in-training work and learn at the inn under the guidance of hospitality professionals.

Students also have access to the school's Arizona Hospitality Research and Resource Center, which houses an extensive library and produces a quarterly newsletter about events and trends in the hotel and restaurant management industry. The center also conducts research and drafts tourist-related plans for such clients as the Hopi and Navajo tribes, the city of Flagstaff, and the Grand Canyon Railway.

The pride and passion of the school's associate dean, William Miller, is the Marion W. Isbell Endowment for Hospitality Ethics. This program began in the fall of 1989 with a $100,000 endowment by Isbell, the late founder of Ramada Inns Inc. His endowment spawned the first program in the nation to help students understand and practice business ethics related to the industry.

NAU's President Eugene M. Hughes, after a four-month sabbatical with the Sheraton Corporation, saw the need for a school to train hospitality industry executives. The school, one of only six in the nation, was established in June, 1986. The first 127 graduates received their B.S. degrees in Hotel and Restaurant Management in December, 1989, and May, 1990.