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[[newspaper clipping]]

March 28, 1971  25

Davis' Unique DQU Will Start Friday
By MICHAEL FALLON
Sacramento Union Education Writer

DAVIS - Next Friday afternoon, the federal government will deed 643 acres, 10 beige buildings and hundreds of telephone poles to trustees of the nation's first American Indian-Chicano institution of higher learning.

At a powwow-fiesta, an abandoned U.S. Army communications base — located six miles west of Davis amid fields of alfalfa, barley, rice and sugar beets - will become the campus of Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University (DQU).

This is the first time, as far as one U.S. official knows, that the federal government has put into the hands of native American Indians and Mexican-Americans property which is readily adaptable to educational purposes.

MEL R. SUMMERS, assistant regional director for surplus property utilization of the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, was the official directly involved in the transfer of the site to DQU.

"Essentially, the concept is that Indians and Chicanos will have opportunities to receive college-level educations oriented to their needs, with the institution and courses administered by Indians and Chicanos," Summers said.

David Risling, 49, a handsome, silver-haired Hoopa Indian and chairman of DQU trustees, said "the big thing, besides giving students skills they can take back to their homes or reservations, is to establish pride."

THERE IS broad support for these goals, particularly as they affect Indians.

"The time has come to break decisively with the past," President Nixon said in a message to Congress last July, "and to create the conditions for a new era in which the Indian future is determined by Indian acts and Indian decisions."

Now, the question arises: Can DQU meet its education goals?

Risling, coordinator of Native American studies at the University of California at Davis,  siad {{said}}, "We're only going to do the things that we can do and can afford to do.

"SOMEBODY is always worrying about us failing. We're thinking positive."

Even with the power of positive thinking, DQU still faces enormous problems — in financing, in administering the funds it receives, in program planning, in averting a takeover by militant groups and in alleviating the concerns of many local residents.

The federal site on Yolo County Road 31 — it has a market value of $427,000, excluding improvements — came to public attention Nov. 3.

At daybreak, 26 Indians — most of them Northern California college students — scaled a six-foot fence topped by three strands of barked [[barbed]] wire, dropped onto the base property and set up a tepee. DQU trustees did not participate in the invasion, but some trustees, at least, were fully aware of the plans.

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THE INVASION was prompted, one of the fence climbers said, by telegrams from then U.S. Sen. George Murphy reporting there was a good possibility the base would be turned over to UC Davis for rice and primate center research.

UCD officials, who never received a copy of the Murphy telegram, later withdrew their application for the land and DQU became the sole applicant.

DQU leaders, in a preliminary development plan circulated last fall, spoke of a beginning enrollment of 350, establishment of a medical college by 1973 and of graduate programs in Native American and Chicano studies by 1975.

But in order to get a deed to the property from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, DQU leaders had to trim their proposal.

SUMMERS, interviewed in his office at HEW regional headquarters in San Francisco, said the beginning enrollment this summer would be about 75 parttime and fulltime students. DQU will seek to establish itself as a two-year college with some remedial high school courses, he said, and later can seek four-year status.

"It's literally a bootstrap operation," Summers said. "But they've scaled down their initial proposal to the point where I feel confident they can make a go of it."

A further requirement for getting the deed was "correspondent" — or preaccreditation — status from the junior college commission of the Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC).

WASC, through its secondary and junior college commissions, also accredits public high schools and community colleges.

DR. HARRY Wiser of Modesto, executive secretary of the WASC junio college commission, described the DQU proposal as "sort of intriguing . . . different, but it well might work."

Correspondent status, he explained, "means that applicants have the plans and potential for an institution even before they get started, and show evidence of sound planning and resources."

Wiser said the next step for an institution such as DQU, after starting classes, was to apply as a recognized candidate for accreditation. Before this [[sic]]recongition could be given, he said, DQU would have to have some kind of paid faculty and staff.

In discussing the financing of DQU, Summers said there were prospects of "a lot of money" from the country's largest private foundations and that DQU, once in operation, could resonably [[reasonably]] expect tuition money from federal loans for many of its students.

DQU LEADERS were quoted in local newspapers as saying they had a commitment of $100,000 from the Ford Foundation.

In a telephone interview, a spokesman said the Ford Foundation was "actively interested" in DQU and engaged in conversations with people able to judge the institution, but had made no commitment. The spokesman said no commitment would be possible until October.

Risling said DQU would "plug into where the money is," whether in foundations, state contracts, or in federal grants for such purposes as studies in the im-

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