ARIZONA (By Judd Slivka, Arizona Republic) February 13, 2007 — The idea of a five-university system for Arizona is dead.

The drastic, historic changes proposed last year are being replaced by a tamer set of goals for the state's three universities that would produce only a slightly different flavor than exists today.

After meeting for four hours Saturday, the group redesigning the public university system offered a plan that will avoid separating Arizona State University West from ASU and calling it Central Arizona University. Nor will it create a two-tiered system featuring new universities in southern and western Arizona.

"Maybe we don't have to shake things up and see where they fall," said Edith Auslander, a member of the group and University of Arizona vice president.

Instead, the proposal, which is not yet final, establishes several themes that would bring about gradual changes. They include:

• The need for students to have a variety of different options for tuition, perhaps even within a single university. This would pave the way for differentiated tuition, perhaps not at the university level, but within different schools and colleges within a single university.

• A renewed commitment to diversity at all three universities, which will require significant increases in financial aid. The discussion Saturday focused on the Board of Regents' 1989 initiative, "Our Common Commitment," which had a goal of doubling the number of minority students the universities attracted each year.

• A commitment to work better with community college systems to move more students through.

• A plan for Northern Arizona University perhaps to expand its successful "2+2" programs at community colleges. Students pay community college rates and attend community college classes for their first two years. Then they pay the higher NAU tuition to attend NAU classes at sites around the state to complete the final two years of their degree.

• Options to deal with growth in Pima County, which is gaining more college-age residents than any other place in the state. It is going to need some place for them to go once the University of Arizona caps its enrollment at 40,000 students in a few years. And Maricopa County may need another option as well.

The plan does not affect a proposal for an expanded downtown campus for ASU, nor does it change plans for a downtown Phoenix medical school.

The previous plan

It appears the suggested changes will break a few plates in the universities' china cabinets. The changes won't be the cataclysmic earthquake that was anticipated after then-Regents President Chris Herstam suggested a five-university system almost a year ago.

Herstam's plan was based on projections that the state will face a college capacity crisis over the next two decades.

It proposed breaking ASU West into a free-standing university and combining the University of Arizona-South and Northern Arizona University-Yuma into a single university. Both schools would have been under a single president as a regional university system, along with Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff.

That plan caused an outcry among many, particularly in the West Valley and among NAU boosters. West Valley residents emphatically wanted ASU West to remain part of ASU, and people in northern Arizona didn't want NAU to be part of a second tier of the university system.

As a result of that outcry, and as an acknowledgement of a tight-fisted, conservative Legislature that probably wouldn't pay for new universities, the redesign committee chose to tweak, not level.

"The best model for the state is a three-university model," said David Longanecker, the executive director of the Western Interstate Council for Higher Education, and the state's consultant on the redesign study. "But we have to do it in a better way tomorrow than we're doing it today."

The key, Longanecker said, was two fundamentals.

"Three (universities) for now. 'Who knows?' for later.

"Three for now, if people play."

Factional differences

And that is a crucial part, because even in the eight-person redesign group, 40 minutes of productive conversation led into an hour of factional differences over details of what a tweaked university system should look like.

Kathy Church, ASU's vice-provost and a member of the committee, suggested the ASU concept of "One university in many places." That would have ASU offering similar courses on its four campuses, but with tuition pegged to the quality of the courses.

Under the ASU plan, which will be implemented next year, a student enrolled in the Ira A. Fulton School of Engineering at the university's main campus would pay more than a student enrolled in the university's general engineering course at the ASU Polytechnic Campus in Mesa.

But if you do that, said Rufus Glasper, chancellor of the Maricopa Community College District, are you saying that the admission requirements to get into the Fulton school are higher than the other program? And if so, does that require a community college student to have to take more classes just to qualify? And if that's the case, aren't you then limiting access to the universities, when the point of the redesign process was to increase access?

Tenure for teaching

Another suggestion by Longanecker, to consider a system that would award tenure to faculty who primarily teach, rather than research, drew the group into another debate. It focused on the traditional notions of what tenure should be awarded for, but also took another twist.

The state's two large research universities, ASU and UA, do a fairly efficient job at educating undergraduate students, as far as research universities go. But, Longanecker said, in the context of teaching efficiency, a professor who teaches three classes a semester isn't as efficient in moving students through a system as a professor who teaches four or five classes a semester.

"If, frankly, there's only one model," Longanecker said, "you'll lose that battle because the community colleges will come along and say, 'We want to concentrate on teaching.' "

The wild card

The community colleges remain the wild card in this. No one really brought up the subject of the colleges offering baccalaureate degrees, although it is a topic of concern.

A bill is moving through the Legislature, scheduled to be heard by a House committee Tuesday, that would give the community colleges carte blanche to offer four-year degrees in any discipline they desired.

Even the community colleges' representative, Glasper, didn't bring it up at the meeting. He chose, he said, to focus on the issues of higher education that are under the purview of the state Board of Regents, which constitutionally controls four-year education in the state.

The next step for the redesign process is a revision of the ideas discussed Saturday, which will happen over the next 10 days. The group will provide a concept or concepts for the university redesign to the full Feasibility and Planning Study Workgroup on Feb. 23. The proposal will then go on the road to various groups, such as alumni, students and university faculty. A completed concept is expected to be presented to the regents at their April meeting, but where it will go from there is unclear.