A Cynical Exercise In Promoting Unnecessary Suburban Development Via Academia Gets Underway In The Middle Of Nowhere. By Margaret Regan ON OPENING DAY at Arizona International Campus of the University of Arizona, first there were the speeches, the television cameras and the beaming parents. When the oratory had died away and the parents had departed, the business of the new college finally began. The 44 new students went inside to their first class in stark Building 40 of the University of Arizona Science and Technology Park. Later, in a temporary bookstore, they bought up Spanish grammars and copies of Beowulf and Machiavelli's The Prince. They bypassed the library, which at the moment has two computers but no books, but a few tinkered on the new PCs in the computer lab. Outside, they slouched along the corporate park's covered walkways in flannel shirts and baggy jeans, in black lipstick and miniskirts, heading to the company cafeteria for lunch among the IBMers, Microsofters and Hughes-ites. One corporate type in the lunchroom complained about relaxed security. "Now the guard (at the gated park's security booth) will just let in anybody who looks young enough," she complained. Nevertheless, the students all wore the little plastic photo ID's that are de rigueur everywhere in the park except in building 40--they're supposed to flash them to the security booth guards when they come to school each day--and they dutifully punched in their electronic keys to get back into the college building through its locked back door. But during all this activity at the college-that-doesn't-look like-a-college something from the morning's festivities lay abandoned on the hot tiles of its front patio: it was a giant cardboard check for $50,000. During the ceremony, a Hughes Missile Systems rep had given the check to AIC's provost, Celestino Fernández, who said he'd use it to help purchase laptop computers for each and every member of the pioneering freshman class. It was odd, definitely odd, that this small windfall still lay forlornly outside. Maybe, though, the forgotten money was a good omen, because money has cast its compromising shadow over the new college from the start. Take its location. The original prescription for the college, written by a blue-ribbon panel of community leaders, called unequivocably for a site in the heart of the city. But a cohort of land developers and their friends on the Arizona Board of Regents won a nasty battle and defiantly put the new college some 17 miles east of downtown, cheek by jowl with land ripe for profitable development. Planted in the former IBM corporate park along interstate 10 at the Rita Ranch exit, the school is hard by the Rita Ranch subdivision so enthusiastically championed by real estate executive and Regent George H. "Hank" Amos III. Nor is it far from the soon-to-be-developed Rocking K Ranch, a massive project of Don Diamond, community "associate" of the college, and longtime business partner of Donald Pitt, the former regent who engineered the UA's acquisition of the IBM plant in the first place. Regent John Munger, now president of the board, led people to believe the IBM location would be "a ganga deal," as he called it. But it's not all that cheap. Arizona International is paying $350,000 in annual rent for the first floor of Building 40, says David Gnage, the college's senior finance officer. Right now the college is using only 35,000 square feet of the first floor's 60,000 square feet and Gnage says it could reduce its rent if it subleases the empty offices in the back of the building. The college also is paying $99,960 a year in utilities and operating costs. AIC shelled out $180,000 for furnishings and an additional $70,000 for renovations, some of it going to convert the building's claustrophobic warren of interior offices and corridors into the present claustrophobic warren of windowless classsrooms and corridors. But the largest piece of that $70,000 renovation fund, about $45,000, Gnage says, paid for such high-tech goodies as the hard-wiring of every classroom for computers. AIC's own budget figures show the legislature has so far allotted some $5.5 million to the new school. That money was paid out between 1994, after the regents in 1993 authorized planning for what was then known as a new "Pima County Campus," on through the current fiscal year, which ends in June 1997. Ironically, this fiscal largesse, benefiting a tiny handful of students, comes at a time of debilitating cutbacks at the other campuses in the state system, including the UA. Enrollment projections for AIC have been in continuous freefall. The original justification for the college was an estimate made in the early 1990s that some 55,000 additional students would flood the state system by 2010. That prediction was later revised downward to 39,000 students by 2010, 55,000 students by 2015, but plans for the college continued apace. The regents have now capped AIC's enrollment at 5,000, down from the original proposed cap of 10,000. As recently as a year ago, Fernández said he expected a starting freshman class of 150. This spring he was down to predicting 100. School officials blame the chaos of the last year, including late votes by the regents on the school's location and curriculum, for the low turnout. In the end only 53 students applied, said Michael Celaya, AIC director of enrollment services, and nearly all of them got in. The opening-morning speakers boasted that the innovations of this college are unlike any heretofore seen, what with its emphasis on undergraduate teaching, its team-taught, interdisciplinary courses, its computers and its "academic house" system, which replaces traditional academic departments. Nevertheless, it's business as usual in at least one respect: its high proportion of administrators. AIC is now a "campus" of the UA, but it's supposed to go independent one day, a fact that allowed planners to install a whole new layer of admininstrators who duplicate the functions of administrators at the UA. It also creates, this year at least, an unheard-of administrator/student ratio of almost one to six. (Some administrators are slated to teach the occasional course.) Provost Fernández, benefiting from a $2,570 raise over last year, now earns $131,090 a year, making him one of the highest paid academic administrators anywhere in the UA outside the medical school, below only the president, provost, an associate provost and two deans. And despite AIC's touted emphasis on learning, Fernández's pay is more than twice that of the highest-paid AIC professor, historian Edwin Clausen, who earns $60,000 for a job that also includes one-quarter administrative work. Fernández, presiding over a college of 44 students, also earns far more than Randall Groth, dean of the Sierra Vista Branch Campus, also dedicated mostly to undergraduate teaching. Groth gets $80,000 for leading a school of about 200 students. The college starts up with a faculty of six professors, an enthusisatic and eclectic bunch, all of whom have excellent credentials, at least on paper. "These are really interesting people," Clausen said. "We all have a sense of forward movement. The level of discourse is extremely high. We have a chance to be creative." Clausen and his colleagues have a heavy teaching load--the equivalent of four courses a semester--and they came into the school knowing it will operate without tenure. They're all on one-year renewable contracts. Clausen believes AIC's guidelines for due process protect academic freedom, saying they are "absolutely strong enough to prevent instrusion into free-spirited inquiry." Given the small student body in the first year, the unheard-of teacher/student ratio of almost one to seven is what's drawn in the students. New freshman Sheila Kressler of Tucson, a graduate of Palo Verde Christian High, said, "I was going to go to the main campus (UA) but the smallness attracted me." Agreed Jake Dotson of Los Angeles, "It's the small student-teacher ratio, and the opportunity to be in class with just 11 students." Genevieve Cabrera, mother of freshman Christopher, a Salpointe grad, said she's "thrilled" with AIC. She's not worried about the newness of the school, especially since her son's diploma will proclaim him a graduate of the UA, Arizona International Campus. (The school is accredited as part of the UA but plans to seek its own accreditation. Students are also eligible to use all UA facilities.) Forty of the students who joined AIC's first class are from Arizona, 29 of those from Tucson; 36 percent are minorities; 60 percent are on financial aid. Presumably they'll be driving to school since there are no Sun Tran buses to the campus. The 12 who live in UA dorms can ride a special shuttle for $130 a semester. Fernández exulted in their achievements at the ceremonies, calling the students "exceptionally talented." He said they have an average high school GPA of 3.13 and average SAT scores of 1020, some 110 points above what he said was the national SAT average of 910. But Fernández, whose academic field is the sociology of education, was wrong. This year's national SAT average is 1013, just seven points below the AIC average. Arizona's average is 1046, putting AICers' SAT scores below their fellow Arizonans'. Enrollment director Celaya said that AIC's admission standards roughly parallel the UA's but in some cases students who didn't meet the standards were admitted anyway. "For those who don't meet the criteria, we use a portfolio or work sample to see if they have that spark," he explained. It remains to be seen what will become of this college that's emerged incongruously in a fortress of multinational corporations, that's sprouted up in suburbia's future. But one young student agitator took an action the first day that along with that forgotten Hughes check is almost enough to give one hope. Instead of listening to his new professors at the first class meeting of "On Becoming a Fully Educated Person," he was busily writing out fliers. They were invitations to his fellow AICers to come to his house on Sunday to plot out ways to defy the regents.

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