Tucson Weekly: An Extravagant Failure (October 2

An Extravagant Failure

Where Was The Leadership That Might Have Prevented The AIC Fiasco?
By Tucson Weekly Staff
WE'VE NOW HAD, oh, about three years of hype about the Arizona International Campus of the University of Arizona.
On one side, we've had the regents proclaiming that putting a college into the UA Science and Technology Park on the town's far eastside would be a wonderful blending of business and education, and a terrific way to handle a huge student population clamoring for its all-new, tenure-free brand of education. And on the other side, we've had the school's provost, Celestino Fernández, making extravagant promises about the opportunities his students would have, promises he had neither the faculty nor the facilities to fulfill.
Now, after a year of dismal enrollments and otherwise disastrous failure at AIC, everybody's changing their stories. Last week, the regents announced they intend to uproot AIC and replant it on the main campus. They'll strip it of its status as a branch campus and re-constitute it as a "college" of the University of Arizona, temporarily, they say. And they plan to chuck its much-vaunted "interdisciplinary" curriculum and replace it with something Regent Hank Amos calls less "far-out."
Currents Now they're telling us AIC cannot hope to generate the enrollment it needs unless it moves over to the UA, and that AIC cannot deliver on its educational promises unless it makes full use of the main campus libraries, labs and courses.
We're tempted to say we told you so, and at least our advice was free. But the regents learned their lesson only after spending some $7.7 million of the taxpayers' money on AIC.
By the time it moves next summer, AIC will have spent a cool million and change on rent and utilities for its expensive berth in the old IBM plant, and an additional $70,000 for renovations. At least the $180,000 worth of new furniture AIC bought can make the move, provided the cramped UA campus can find any space for it or its professors or students. And let us not forget the $100,000 site study former UA President Manuel Pacheco paid for out of the UA's own pocket, a study regents hell-bent on an eastside location conspicuously repudiated.
An 11th-hour $55,000 advertising campaign this summer failed to draw the hordes predicted by the regents and the provost. At the beginning of its second school year, AIC has a grand total of 106 students, and no stampede of students in sight.
The regents and provost are trying to cast their about-face as a positive move. Amos explained AIC has to pull up stakes because of the rampaging success of the UA Science and Technology Park (can you say "Microsoft?"), but there's nothing positive about it. This is costly face-saving at its worst.
WHERE WAS THE leadership that might have prevented this fiasco?
It's too bad the regents don't have to answer to the voters, because they're mostly responsible. (Only Judy Gignac and a student regent voted nay to the AIC location.) Tucson regents John Munger, a Growth Lobby lawyer, and Amos, a real-estate executive, pushed hard and publicly for the eastside location. The regents' vote accommodated real-estate developers who hoped to commandeer the publicly funded college for private profit. By helping to push the city eastward, the college would make nearby land projects more valuable.
As has been documented in these pages before, former regent Donald Pitt brokered the UA's acquisition of the old IBM plant in the first place, and campaigned to put a college in it. Pitt is the business partner of Don Diamond, a community "associate" of the college who is developing the massive Rocking K Ranch east of AIC. The college also was to help lure residents to Rocking K's Arizona Senior Academy, an intellectual retirement community spearheaded by Henry Koffler, the former UA president who first put a young Celestino Fernández on the path to lucrative administrative heaven.
The university's leaders must bear blame as well. Pacheco should have resisted loudly when the regents bypassed his blue-ribbon committee's recommendations for a downtown campus. Sure, the regents might have fired him for foiling their machinations, but at least he'd still have his integrity intact. And the UA Faculty Senate seemed to be asleep on the job. The profs did protest the illicit appointment of Fernández to the post of AIC's provost without a national search, but their criticisms of the location, the curriculum and the no-tenure policy came too little, too late.
And then there was the local media, which almost wholly abandoned its professional obligation to hold up public expenditures to skeptical scrutiny. Early critical reporting on AIC at The Arizona Daily Star was quickly succeeded almost exclusively by enthusiastic editorials and flowery features. And this summer the Star accepted AIC ads that were misleading at best and fraudulent at worst. The college advertised majors that it had no faculty to teach, and declared that its classes were taught by "professors," when in fact it was hiring part-time instructors without Ph.Ds.
SO WHAT HAPPENS next? The regents' three-pronged effort to resuscitate the ailing school virtually requires that it be rebuilt from scratch. Everything--everything--must be put back on the table for discussion, including whether AIC ought to exist at all.
Should the regents continue to throw good money after bad? AIC was supposed to give a better education to undergrads, but it's been a wildly costly experiment benefiting only a tiny number of students. It has come at a time when drastic budget cutbacks have seriously compromised undergraduate education all across the UA. And as a new liberal-arts college at the UA, AIC will be a double-dipper, draining funds to pay for its own administrative overhead, while its students use the UA resources in the form of courses, labs and libraries. It's hard to imagine what classes AIC can offer that will not expensively duplicate classes the UA already provides.
If the regents really want to improve undergraduate education, they should consider this: AIC's $2.2 million budget for fiscal '98 alone, allocated differently, could pay the yearly salaries of a small army of 55 UA assistant professors. Fernández's bloated salary alone would pay for three.
Does Fernández have the credibility to continue to lead AIC? Scarred by ethical and administrative lapses, his first year at the helm of his own school was a failure by any measure. The record shows that he didn't accomplish even the most basic of university administrative tasks: nailing down conditions of faculty service before his faculty was in place. His own paper trail reveals that he offered jobs to prospective professors under one set of conditions, and then changed those conditions when the new hires arrived in town. His high-handed dismissal of an outspoken professor brought unwanted national attention to the struggling school. The serious charge that academic freedom was violated on his campus has yet to be addressed. And in the midst of AIC's desperate fiscal crisis he took still another raise. He now earns $132,901, one of the biggest paychecks anywhere in the UA.
JUST OVER A year ago, when the AIC first opened its doors, a prescient critic by the name of Kenneth Smith wrote an opinion piece in the Star in response to the paper's tireless cheerleading for the school. A UA prof who had served on a faculty watchdog committee, Smith wrote that "the last thing that the UA needs is a highly visible and extravagant failure."
Sad to say, in AIC, that's exactly what we got.

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