People Who Build Schools: It Takes a Vision
Missing Rung: Dr. Henry Koffler, left, saw Academy Village as a top step for academic career ladders. Photo by Tim Fuller for NRTA Live & Learn
On the ranchland a half-hour southeast of Tucson, AZ, a hundred low stucco houses are scattered along a slope in the desert scrub, and about forty more are in various stages of development. Across a dry valley, the village faces a mountain wall that rises toward Rincon Peak, the 8,482-foot pinnacle of Saguaro National Park. But instead of centering on a golf course like so many other developments, this community boasts a lecture hall, and rather than bright green fairways, native vegetation still carpets the open desert between the houses. Academy Village is a dream of Dr. Henry Koffler, a molecular biologist who's both a graduate and a retired president of the University of Arizona.
His rise up the university ladder was sure-footed, from Arizona to Wisconsin, Purdue, Minnesota, and Massachusetts, and back to Arizona as president, but he also saw scholars with plenty to offer the world who, when they retired, were suddenly “without the help they had come to count on — the office space and supplies, the secretary, tech support, and, most of all, the colleagues who are around day-to-day,” he says. Expanding campuses gobbled up the bungalows where retired professors had once stayed or taxes on the nearby residences skyrocketed.
In 1992, after retiring, Koffler set out to add an option at the top of the academic career ladder. His approach is half real-estate development, half campus. Anyone can buy a house in Academy Village — the community center offers fitness facilities, a swimming pool, a dining room; the Arizona Senior Academy, a sort of mini-campus, has a library, a seminar room, a computer atelier, and an auditorium.
Twice a week, University of Arizona faculty members come out to talk about everything from lightning to smallpox. There are concerts, too, by the likes of Professor Tom Patterson and his students, who have turned Tucson into Classical Guitar Town. Village residents such as oceanographer and former president of Drexel University Bill Gaither and Harvard physicist and Nobel Prize-winner Nicolaas Bloembergen summarize a lifetime of research. In nearby Vail, residents also mentor students and judge science fairs.
But the most satisfying part for Henry Koffler is the way Academy Villagers “watch out for each other,” as he puts it. “They provide meals for someone who is ill. They make newcomers feel welcome. They offer rides into town. They offer emotional help and concern.” Far from famously petty faculty politics, “the mutual support here,” Koffler observes, “has been beyond my expectations.”
Academy Village, AZ: Timeline of a Dream Realized
1939: On his own at 17, Henry Koffler emigrates from Vienna, Austria, to the “High Noon” town of Prescott, Arizona.
1992: Koffler retires as President of the University of Arizona and starts on his dream project.
2007: About half of the homes are built and occupied in Academy Village, with more on the way.
About the Author
Steve Cox is co-author with U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize winner Ted Kooser of Writing Brave and Free: Encouraging Words for People Who Want to Start Writing, available from Barnes & Noble.
This article originally appeared in NRTA Live & Learn, Winter 2007.
