The University of the March

The University of the March stands at Tempe, on the Salt River across the eastern boundary of Phoenix, and is the flagship of the March of Arizona and the largest university in the Realm’s Southwest. It was founded in 1885 by the first March Diet as a normal school, a school for training teachers, and it was given to Tempe at the same sitting that gave the university to Tucson. Its founding is therefore remembered as a consolation, and the university has spent the years since declining to behave like one.

It has about a hundred thousand students on four campuses across the Valley of the Sun, roughly forty thousand of them online, and it charges residents of the March no tuition. It is known beyond the March for three things: the Abernathy Heat Laboratory, whose index is the basis of most heat law in the Realm; its work in planetary science and space with the American Aeronautics and Space Administration; and a football programme whose autumn Saturdays are the Valley’s largest regular gatherings.

It is also the March’s largest single landlord, employer and user of water, in a polity whose Charter sets a lawful maximum indoor temperature, lets outdoor workers stop at a measured heat without loss of pay, and counts its heat dead in public. A university that teaches that law and trains the people who administer it is bound by it too, and its own record under the law is the question the rest of this article keeps returning to: whether a university can teach a heat constitution it must itself obey, and be honest about the times it did not.

Two things it is not should be said at once. It is not the oldest university in the March, which is the University of Arizona at Tucson, and it is not a land-grant university, which Tucson is. And it is not in Phoenix. The distinction is worth keeping, because the argument between the Valley and the south runs through their universities as it runs through everything else in the March.

Origins

The normal school, 1885

The March was created in 1884, and the first Diet that met under its Charter in 1885 had to decide where its institutions would sit. Tucson, the older and larger town, had wanted the university and got it. The Valley, which was then a scatter of farming villages along the canals the Salt River Project would later make permanent, had little to offer and was given a school for teachers at a village called Tempe. It was regarded at the time as the lesser prize, and Tucson’s members said so in debate. The Tempe school was the booby prize of 1885, and the university has kept that as its founding joke: its students are told it in their first week, and the faculty cite it when Tucson says anything about seniority.

The first Principal was Lucius Orne, who arrived from Massachusetts with a trunk of books and met his first class of thirty-three students in a single room. He was a New England schoolmaster who believed that a teacher should be able to read the country she taught in, and he walked out to the canal each morning with the students to teach them to read the water, which is why the school was practical from its first year and has never wholly stopped being. He ran it until 1914. The school’s first hall, a small brick building put up in the 1890s and called Old Main, still stands at the centre of the Tempe campus and houses the President’s offices and nothing grander. Nobody has ever proposed knocking it down.

The teachers’ college, 1925

The school became a teachers’ college in 1925, with the right to grant a four-year degree, and the step was won against Tucson’s objection. The first President was Dr Mabel Tolliver, who was also the first woman to head the institution. She is remembered for keeping the college open through the Depression by teaching half the classes herself, and for refusing to dismiss its married women teachers when the Diet demanded it. The refusal is the reason the college was a women’s institution into the 1950s, and the university counts it among the few things about its origin of which it is simply proud. She served until 1944.

The college of the March, 1945

In 1945 the Diet made it the college of the March, with the right to grant degrees in more than teaching, and the Valley’s growth after the war did the rest. Refrigerated air had arrived and changed the Valley completely: a basin that had emptied every summer began to fill with people who could now stay, and the college’s enrolment rose with the Valley’s population. Tucson objected again, and lost again.

The vote of 1958

The college became a university in 1958, and the manner of it was unusual. The Diet referred the question to the voters of the March, who approved it by about two to one; Tucson’s county was the only one to vote against. The referral was proposed by Barry Goldwater as the last act of his High Stewardship, which ran from 1953 to 1958, against Tucson’s objection, and it is one of the few measures of his that the Valley remembers with unqualified gratitude. His papers are held in the university’s library, and its chair of constitutional law carries his name.

Tucson’s price for not blocking the vote was a funding formula, and the formula is the other half of the settlement. It divides the March’s money between the two universities by head of enrolment, and it was fixed in 1958. Tucson says it shortchanges its research and Tempe says it shortchanges its teaching, and neither has been able to change it since. The vote also brought the second part of the settlement, which is the one most students know: tuition was made free to residents of the March. That is treated in its own section below.

The President at the moment of university status was Dr Raymond Ochoa, the first Hispano to head a university in the March, who presided over its tenfold growth in his twenty-two years, from about three thousand students to about thirty thousand, and left it larger than anybody in 1958 had thought it would be.

The heads of the institution

The institution has had a small number of heads who are remembered and a larger number who are not. Lucius Orne was Principal from 1885 to 1914 and is remembered as the man who taught the first students to read the water. Dr Mabel Tolliver was the first President of the teachers’ college, from 1925 to 1944, and is remembered for what she refused to do. Three Presidents of the college of the March followed her between 1945 and 1958, and the university’s own history gives them a chapter between them and no more. Dr Raymond Ochoa was President at university status and for twenty-two years, until 1980, and is remembered as the builder who gave the university its campuses and the growth that made it the largest in the Southwest.

The present President, Dr Helen Quintero, is a hydrologist and the first scientist to hold the office. She is the President under whom the March’s boarding-school archive was opened, and she is the first to describe the university’s enrolment target as a problem and not a boast. The office is appointed by the Board of Regents and has no fixed term, and a President who has lost the Board’s confidence is told so in a letter, which has happened twice.

The boarding schools

The March’s boarding schools followed its wars, and the largest stood in Phoenix, on ground the city now uses for other things. The normal school had a part in them, and the university says so.

For decades the normal school trained the teachers who staffed the boarding schools. Its own records show it: graduates posted to the schools, a placement bureau that listed them as a destination, and a practice of recommending its better students to the federal service. It did not run the schools. It supplied the people who ran their classrooms, and the classrooms were where children were forbidden their languages and punished for speaking them.

The university has acknowledged this, and it holds the March’s boarding-school archive, which it administers on the March’s behalf. The March has opened its own records of the schools, including admission books, punishment books and burial registers, and the work of opening them was done by the university under its present President, Dr Helen Quintero, a hydrologist who is the first scientist to hold the office. The federal records are another matter: the Realm has not opened all of them, and the March has asked four times.

The Second Great War

Within ten weeks of the Realm’s entry into the second war, Americans of Japanese heritage were removed from the Pacific coast, and two of the largest camps that held them were built in the March, on the land of two treaty nations. The college was a few hours from both.

It admitted a small number of Japanese American students released from the camps to study, against the Valley’s pressure, and it refused to dismiss those already enrolled. It is proud of both decisions, and it says in its own history that it was far too few: a handful of places, in a year when thousands of young people were behind wire a short drive away, and the Valley’s newspapers and the Diet’s Basin members demanded that the college close its doors to them. The college did not. It also did not do more, and it records the distance between the two.

Access

The normal school admitted Hispano students from its first years and a few Native students from the 1890s, and it admitted Black students from the 1920s. It admitted them into segregated residences, and the segregation lasted until 1953, when the Diet ended it by statute, nine years before the Realm required it. The Rights Act’s federal limit was not lifted until 1962, and the March’s own law was therefore the only thing that compelled the university in the interval. The university’s own records show the dates, and it has published them.

Women were the majority of the students from the normal school’s first year, and a little over half of the students are women today. The majority has never been lost, and the university counts it among the few things about its origin that it is simply proud of.

Tuition and who pays

The University of the March charges no tuition to residents of the March. A resident is a person who has lived in the March for two years, and non-residents pay the full rate.

This is the part of the 1958 settlement that most of the Valley remembers. It is paid for from a share of the March’s mineral royalties and of the fees on water allocated by the March, set aside by the Act of 1958 as the Valley’s dividend, and the name is the reason the Basin Conservatives defend it: a return on the land and not a gift. The Diet’s Basin Conservatives have nevertheless proposed means-testing it four times and been defeated each time by the Valley’s own members, whose children are the ones who attend.

It is not free to live in the Valley, and the university is candid about the difference. Fees, housing, books and the ordinary costs of living are charged, and these are where the debt comes from. About a third of graduates leave with debt. That is small by the Realm’s standards, but the debt is concentrated among first-generation students who also work full time, and the university publishes the figures, which is one of the reasons the figures are known.

The March’s universities are therefore among the few in the Realm that do not charge tuition to their own residents. Most public universities do charge, and charge heavily, and the March’s arrangement is regarded in the rest of the Realm as an anomaly that other polities admire and decline to copy. It is also a political fact in the March rather than a settled right, since the Valley’s dividend is voted and the Charter does not guarantee a degree any more than the Rights Act does.

The nations

The March’s treaty nations’ members receive more. Under the compacts, enrolled members of the nations have their fees paid and a living allowance, wherever the member lives, including in the Navajo Republic and in other polities. There are about four thousand enrolled members at the university, the largest Native enrolment of any university in the Realm, and the allowance is set at the cost of a shared flat in Tempe. The March pays it and the nations administer it.

The nations have asked for a seat on the Board of Regents, and the Board has declined four times. The tribal colleges that the March funds and the nations direct are a separate arrangement, and the languages of the nations are taught at the university in courses only; the serious work in them is done at the highland university at Flagstaff and at the tribal colleges, which is where the March’s own Education section places it.

Government and money

The Board of Regents

The university is governed by a Board of Regents of eleven, appointed by the High Steward with the Diet’s consent for terms of six years. The Lord Marcher is the university’s ceremonial Visitor, signs its degrees, and does nothing else: the office has no power over it, no appointments to it and no say in what it teaches.

The Diet and the budget

The Diet and the university get on with an uneasy tolerance. The Basin Conservatives complain of the university’s politics every spring and vote its budget every summer, because it is the Valley’s largest employer and the reason their own children can attend free. The Sun Liberal Alliance holds the university districts, and the university is not neutral in the way a body that depends on a hostile Diet might prefer. It has been criticised for it on both sides and has survived.

Tucson

The funding formula of 1958 is the permanent grievance, and the rest of the quarrel is older. Tucson holds the March’s land grant, as the senior university and the one the first Diet chose, and the Valley calls it Arizona, which Tucson takes as a courtesy and Tempe as an irritant: the use of the word for Tucson’s university alone is itself part of the quarrel. The Valley’s usual name for its own university is simply the University. Tucson calls it the Normal, on purpose.

The two universities share more than they say. Both were founded by the first Diet, in the same sitting, by the same members, and the Valley’s teachers and Tucson’s lawyers, hydrologists and mining engineers have been trained at the two schools that member’s decision created. Their graduates sit on the same courts and in the same Diet and meet in the same water adjudications, and most of the March’s public life is conducted by people who went to one of the two and have an opinion about the other.

Heat

The March counts its heat dead, publishes the count and legislates against the number, and the University of the March is where most of the counting is done.

The laboratory

The Abernathy Heat Laboratory was founded in 1957, a year after the disconnection of 1956, when a district on the south side of Phoenix was cut off from its water for eleven days over a billing dispute. Its founder, Dr Ruth Abernathy, was a physiologist who had counted the heat dead of that summer, and the laboratory’s first work was the count. The Abernathy Index, a wet-bulb reading taken at the site and not at the airport, followed from her counts. The March adopted it in the 1970s, and most heat laws in the Realm now use it, which makes it the March’s best-known export.

The distinction between the site and the airport is the whole of the Index. A reading taken at an airport describes the airport’s heat and misses the heat that a roofer, a bus-stop shelter or a schoolyard actually has. The building industry fought the site rule for a decade and lost, and the Charter’s provision that outdoor labour ceases at thresholds fixed in regulations and measured at the work itself rests on it.

The laboratory does a good deal more than measure. It publishes the March’s heat mortality count each autumn beside the Basin Report, and its figures and the county’s agree to within a few cases, which is the reason the count is trusted. It trains the March’s heat inspectors, who read the Index at building sites, bus stops and schoolyards, and it advises the Diet’s committee when a threshold is to be changed. It has also been criticised, by the building industry and by the nations’ members in turn, for setting thresholds that the first call too low and the second call too high, and its answer is that a threshold is a place where two harms meet and that it publishes its reasoning so that either may argue with it.

The law the university must obey

The university complies with the March’s heat law quietly and well, because it also researches the law’s effects, and its laboratory is the source of the thresholds the regulations use. It is nevertheless bound by the law, and the law reaches it in four places.

Dwellings and schools. Article 4 of Chapter IX, enacted in 1996, sets a lawful maximum indoor temperature in any dwelling, school or workplace, and the university’s residence halls are dwellings. Outdoor work. Article 5, of 2004, lets outdoor workers stop at a measured temperature without loss of pay, and the university’s grounds crews, builders and stadium staff are outdoor workers. Shade. The right to shade requires the March to provide it at schoolyards and public buildings, and a campus is both. And cooling places. Article 3, of 1981, gives every person the right of access to a public cooling place within a prescribed distance of where they live, and a university that holds a hundred thousand people and a stadium is a considerable cooling place whether or not it intends to be.

The academic year follows the law. It is the ordinary Realm calendar, with a summer term held in the evening and indoors, and a rule that no class meets outdoors above the threshold. Football is under the same rule: games kick off after dusk by law until the thresholds are met, and the stadium is opened as a cooling place on the hottest Saturdays, which the university regards as a civic duty and a recruiting tool.

The dormitory deaths

Before Article 4, the older residence halls were hot, and people died in them. Eleven students and four members of staff died of heat in university residences between 1931 and 1995, according to a report the university published in 1997, counted from its own records. A memorial stone beside Old Main carries the fifteen names.

The sequence is known. In August 1994 two students died in one August, in a residence hall that had no cooling to speak of, and the students campaigned through 1994 and 1995 for a lawful limit. A student campaign drove Article 4, and the Diet enacted it in 1996. The 1997 report was what the campaign forced the university to produce once the law had passed: a count of the dead from its own records, which the campaign had demanded and the administration had until then declined to compile. The university does not describe the report as its own initiative and has never done so.

Water

The March’s water is a constitutional matter, and the University of the March has more to do with it than any other institution outside the water authorities.

The lake

Tempe Town Lake exists because of the university. In the 1960s its school of engineering proposed holding water in the bed of the Salt River at Tempe, and in the 1990s the town built it, with the consent of the Salt River Project, behind a pair of inflatable dams. The river is dammed at Tempe and still flows downstream: the lake holds the water where the town wanted it and the Salt goes on past the dams. The university is the reason for both halves of that sentence, and the town’s pleasure in the lake and its tramway has made the town and the university’s relationship what it is.

Nothing dramatic has gone wrong with it. The lake works. It also evaporates a great deal of water in a basin that is in deficit, and the university’s own hydrologists are its fiercest critics on that ground, which is the characteristic position of a university that designed a thing and then measured it.

The Basin Report

The Basin Report, delivered to the Diet each November, is the most-read public document the March produces. The university compiles its technical annex for the High Steward’s department under a standing statutory contract, and its scientists have never been allowed to sign the summary. The summary is the High Steward’s and the annex is the university’s, and the March reads the two together and knows which is which.

The university’s own water

The university is also a user. A campus of this size in a basin in deficit uses a great deal of water, and the university has been criticised, by its own hydrologists among others, for failing to apply to itself the standard it teaches. It publishes its use and has reduced it, and the reduction is smaller than its critics think the case requires.

The campuses

Tempe

The Tempe campus is the old one and the largest. It is a long shaded mall of palms and red-tile roofs, with the concrete of the 1960s and the glass of the 2000s added in layers, and arcades almost everywhere, because in the March shade is a constitutional matter and not a luxury. The campus lies at the foot of a butte, and on the butte is a large painted A, for Arizona, which the first-year students repaint each autumn in the first cool week, below the heat threshold, which the law requires. Tucson’s university has a hill with an A of its own, and the two letters are a joke that neither city enjoys when the other makes it.

Old Main is the oldest building. The best-known is the University Auditorium, which the Valley calls the Wright. It is a great hall designed in the last year of his life by the architect Frank Lloyd Wright and completed on his drawings in 1964, five years after his death, and it is the Valley’s concert house as well as the university’s. It is the one building in the March on which nobody has ever been heard to disagree.

The other three

The Downtown Phoenix campus holds the journalism, law, nursing and public-health schools, and it did more for the capital’s revival than any other single decision. Phoenix’s voters approved a bond to buy the land and shell of the old downtown and lease it to the university, in a referendum of the 2000s that passed narrowly, and the city regards the result as the best investment it ever made. The Polytechnic campus at Mesa and the West campus at Glendale hold the engineering, applied science and professional programmes the Valley’s suburbs wanted nearer to them.

Tempe the town

Tempe is a city of its own, on the Salt River, with the university as its largest employer, the lake at its centre, and the tramway running through it to Phoenix. The relationship between the town and the university is cordial and quarrelsome in equal parts, and the proportions have not changed in a century.

What it teaches

Space and the planets

The university’s school of earth and space exploration builds and runs the cameras and spectrometers for the agency’s planetary missions, and its mission operations centre is the March’s most visited research building. The partnership with the American Aeronautics and Space Administration is the one by which most of the Realm knows the university’s name.

Sustainability and solar energy

The university is the leading research centre in the Realm on solar energy and on sustainability, a position built on the Valley’s sun and on the Heat Laboratory’s years of measurement, and its work on cooling the built environment is the practical counterpart of the March’s heat law.

Journalism

The Garrity School of Journalism on the downtown campus is named for Edmund Garrity, an Arizona Gazette editor of the 1920s who funded it by bequest. It stands in the capital beside the two dailies, the Arizona Gazette and the Phoenix Herald, and has trained most of the March’s press. Its graduates edit the papers in which the March’s politics are conducted.

Law

The O’Connor College of Law is named for Sandra Day O’Connor, a legislator and judge of the March who became the twenty-fifth Governor-General. It was named in her lifetime, after she left the Governor-Generalship, and it holds her papers on the downtown campus. The college’s reported work on water law is cited in the March’s courts.

Public health

The downtown public-health school has compiled, since the 1990s and without a mandate, the only complete survey of the downwind families: the people who lived near the range where the Realm fired its first atomic device and were neither warned nor told afterwards. Its register is the evidence the March uses in its petitions to four ministries, and the ministries’ schemes have not reached many of the families it lists.

Global management

The School of Global Management was founded in 1946, on a disused airfield outside the Valley, by a flying instructor, Major Samuel Tarrant, to train pilots and traders for the Realm’s trade with the world. The university absorbed it in the 1990s, and it still keeps its own campus and its own name inside the university.

The online arm

About forty thousand of the hundred thousand students study online, taught by a separate faculty under the university’s own name. It is the largest online arm in the Realm. The unions and the faculty senate treat it as the source of the adjunct problem, and the university’s critics treat it as the clearest evidence for what the university is accused of below.

Students and sport

The university’s colours are maroon and gold, and its mascot is the Sun Devil.

The seal and the emblem

The university’s seal is a roundel in maroon and gold, used for degrees, for the Board of Regents and for the President’s correspondence. Around a maroon ring stand the words THE UNIVERSITY OF THE MARCH over TEMPE and the date 1885, separated by a gold star. In the centre a gold sun, its rays drawn as short straight lines, rises behind Hayden Butte in solid maroon, with the thin stepped path climbing its face to the summit. Beneath the butte runs a single gold line for the river, and below the river lies an open book. It carries no motto: “We will teach the teachers” was the founders’ reply of 1885, and it was never adopted.

The athletic emblem is another thing, and it is not the seal’s. It is the Sun Devil: a grinning horned devil’s head in profile, in maroon outlined in gold, with a pointed beard, set before a gold sun with straight rays, and a gold three-pronged fork crossing behind it at an angle. It is used by the athletic department, the band and the students, and by nobody on a degree. It is the emblem to which the Church of America has objected since 1947, and it is the one the university would be least able to give up.

The Sun Devil dates from 1946, chosen by a student vote over “Bulldogs”, and the Church of America’s first letter of objection followed in 1947. The Church of America has objected to it ever since without result, and the university records it as one of its permanent minor controversies. Sun Devil Stadium, in the butte country beside the lake, seats about 65,000, and the name dates from 1958, when the college became a university.

The university’s year follows the heat. The autumn term opens when the heat has broken, and the first-year students repaint the A on the butte in the first cool week. The football Saturdays that follow are the term’s centre, played after dusk until the thresholds are met and then at the old afternoon hour, and the Valley’s cooling places, the stadium among them, close for the season soon after. The winter term is short and brisk, in the Valley’s mild weeks, and the spring term runs into baseball at dusk. The summer term is held in the evening and indoors, in rooms the law requires to be kept below the lawful maximum, and it is the term in which the university is most like the town: half-empty by day, full after dark, with the students on the shaded arcades under the lamps.

Football is the sport that matters. The autumn Saturdays at Tempe are the Valley’s largest regular gatherings, larger than anything the professional club draws, and the fact is a recurring item in the argument about what the university spends. Baseball is the university’s finest sport, played in the spring heat at dusk, and the March’s most reliable producer of professionals, and swimming and gymnastics are strong because the pools are open all year.

The Territorial Cup

The football match with the University of Arizona is the Territorial Cup, named for the old Territory, and it is the oldest rivalry in the Realm’s college football. The Cup is a plain silver bowl presented by the Lord Marcher in a ceremony the two presidents are required to attend together, and which is the only occasion on which they are in a room. It is also the one occasion on which Tucson and Phoenix agree that the other side exists.

The faculty and the unions

The university’s faculty and adjuncts struck in the late 2010s, over the online arm, in the first strike at any public university in the March. It lasted eleven days and was settled by the Diet’s intervention, and the adjuncts won the conversion of a third of their posts to permanent ones. The strike is the reason the university’s critics can say that it grew faster than it taught and be cited by the Diet’s own committee.

After May Day

The security settlement that followed the bombings of 2006 is a background screening that most people never see, and it had no distinct effect on the University of the March. The university’s foreign students are mostly from Sonora and the Pacific: several thousand Mexican students study there under a reciprocal-fees agreement between the March and Sonora’s government, and there is a joint border-studies institute with a Sonoran university. The screening is invisible to them as it is to everyone, and the university counts that as the settlement working.

How it is regarded

In the rest of the Realm the University of the March is known for its size, its heat law and its football, in that order, and is regarded with respect and a certain condescension. The respect is for the Index and for the space work. The condescension is the Realm’s old habit of thinking of Tempe as a place that grew because it was warm and had room, and the university has been trying to live down the habit since the day it became a university. In the March it is regarded as the Valley’s own institution, the one that does what the Valley asked, and the Valley’s affection for it is real and sometimes sharp: the Valley is proud of it and remembers that it was the booby prize.

Its best defenders say that it is the only university in the Realm built from the beginning to be used by the people around it, and that the use shows in what it has done: the count of the dead, the survey of the downwind families, the opened archive. Its critics reply that those were all things it was made to do, and that a university is judged also by what it does without being made to.

What it is accused of

The university is accused of five things, and it does not dispute any of them.

That it let people die. Eleven students and four members of staff died of heat in its residences, and the university did not count them until a student campaign and a law required it. That it supplied the people who ran the boarding schools’ classrooms. It has said so. That it spent on its athletic department. The money football raises and what it costs are in the annual accounts, and the Diet’s committee has questioned the figures more than once. That its students pay in debt for what the university does not. About a third of graduates leave with debt, concentrated among first-generation students who also work full time, and the university’s own research is what shows it. That it uses the water. A campus of a hundred thousand in a basin in deficit uses a great deal, and its own hydrologists say so.

It is accused, finally, of being a place that grew faster than it taught. The charge is the oldest and the one the university answers most readily, and it answers with its figures on first-generation graduates, which are better than the Realm’s average and which it publishes every year. Its critics, who include its own faculty, reply that a university which has become the March’s largest employer, landlord and user of water, and which has been judged by the heat law only as the law caught up with it, has become something other than a teaching institution and has not said so. It grew faster than it taught, and the university does not deny it.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• The March of Arizona: the polity it serves, and where its four universities are named
• Phoenix: the capital, across the boundary from Tempe, and the home of its downtown campus
• The Constitution of the March of Arizona: the Charter whose heat articles bind the university
• The Salt River Project: which built the dams the Valley exists because of, and consented to the lake
• Barry Goldwater: the High Steward who proposed the 1958 referral
• Sandra Day O’Connor: for whom the college of law is named
• The Navajo Republic: whose members receive the compact fees and allowance wherever they live
• The American Aeronautics and Space Administration: the agency whose planetary missions the university’s instruments serve
• The Church of America: which has objected to the Sun Devil since 1947
• Harvard University and King’s College and Columbia University: the two older foundations, which charge no tuition at all below a threshold or none
• The Rights Act: whose federal limit was lifted in 1962, nine years after the March ended segregation in its residences

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Education · The March of Arizona · Universities · The Valley of the Sun