Why it matters
Scottsdale Community College is the one item on Scottsdale’s 1960s civic wish list that the city could not build inside its own borders. The 1964–65 Scottsdale Town Enrichment Program asked for a Civic Center, parks, fire stations and a college. The city built the first three. The college went to the Maricopa County Community College District, which put it on 160 acres leased from the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community at Chaparral and Pima roads, just over the city line. It opened to students in 1969, moved onto the campus in August 1970, and has been the only public community college on tribal land in the United States ever since.
That geography is the most important fact about the place. The city’s sovereign neighbor is the college’s landlord until 2069, and the lease made the Community a constituency from the first year: tuition waivers for Native students in 1970, free classes for Community members from 1978, an American Indian Program, and in 2018 an Indigenous Cultural Center. The other famous fact is the mascot. In 1972 students voted for the Artichoke to embarrass an administration they thought was spending too much on sports, won a recount, and outlasted the district board.
Where to find it today
The campus is at 9000 E. Chaparral Road, east of the Loop 101 in the Talking Stick district; the address says Scottsdale 85256, the Community’s zip code. The Indigenous Cultural Center and the Cloud Song business building, both from 2018, are the newest architecture, and the Artichoke Grill in the 1998 Applied Sciences Building puts the mascot’s name on the menu. The Huhugam Ki Museum, a few minutes south on Osborn Road, is where the Community tells the longer history of the land.
How it started
Scottsdale in 1966 had hitching posts on Main Street, a population past 50,000 and no college. The Maricopa County Community College District, created by county voters in 1962, had just opened campuses in Glendale and Mesa in 1965 and was deciding where to build next. Scottsdale’s STEP task force on libraries, museums and galleries had already called for a local liberal arts college in its January 1965 report, and in the spring of 1966 Mayor Bud Tims called local business leaders together to see whether the town would back a campaign.
It would. A fourteen-member STEP committee formed under Paul Messinger, the funeral-home owner and civic fixture, with city manager Bill Donaldson, district board member Bill Van Loo and committee member Billie Gentry among those Messinger later credited. For two years its members attended the district board’s meetings and asked, every time, that Scottsdale be the next campus. In 1968 Chancellor Dr. John Prince came back with several site options, one of them a lease of 160 acres from the Salt River Indian Community. Valley National Bank’s Leonard Huck chaired the county bond committee, voters approved the package, and on November 5, 1968, the board set aside about $5 million for a Scottsdale college (Messinger remembered $4 million of a $14 million package).
The college existed before the campus did. Temporary offices opened in March 1969 in the former North Scottsdale Baptist Church on 82nd Street, nine faculty members were hired that spring, and on August 24, 1969, the first classes, in speech, art, aeronautics and the core curriculum, met in the evenings at Scottsdale High School. A student-made college timeline names Dr. Marion G. Donaldson as founding dean; we could not confirm it elsewhere. Then, on September 21, 1969, the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which the record describes as interested in developing the reservation’s western edge, signed the 99-year lease.
The decisions that locked it in
The lease. Nothing we could find says why the college was not built in Scottsdale. The city had land; it was annexing desert as fast as it could. What the record offers is Prince’s list of options in 1968 and the lease a year later, and the consequences are plain. The college is governed and taxed countywide, so Scottsdale’s council has no vote in it, a point the school districts guide and the property tax guide both make. And the Community, not the city, holds the ground. From the first year the college carried obligations to its landlord that no other Maricopa campus has: tuition waivers for Native American students and the first Indian Cultural Days in 1970, the first Native nursing graduates in 1974, free classes for Community members from 1978, and the cultural center the college built in 2018 and described as a long-standing commitment kept. The Community’s president heard from the new college president in 2022 that Community members attend at no cost. That arrangement runs to 2069.
The barracks. The campus opened on August 20, 1970, in rain and mud, in wooden barracks hauled in from Phoenix, Mesa and Glendale colleges, two weeks before the Labor Day flood cut the city in half. About 1,000 students enrolled. Opening before the buildings were ready meant that when the library, student center, science building, gym and business building opened in January 1972, 3,000 students were waiting, on a campus designed for 5,000. By the fall of 1980 there were nearly 7,000, and an $8.5 million expansion followed. By 1990 enrollment passed 10,000.
The Artichoke. In 1972 the administration asked students to vote on a mascot. The students, in Joan Fudala’s telling, were angry at what they saw as money going to athletics while the library and academic programs went short, and they voted overwhelmingly for the Artichoke. The Scottsdale Daily Progress reported in November 1972 that drovers, avengers, zebras, bikers and sun risers also drew votes. The administration called a recount; the Artichoke won again. It took about two and a half years, until early 1975, for students to get the district governing board to accept it. Then the joke became the brand: Artie the Artichoke, the Fighting Artichokes, and a mascot that turns up on national lists of the best in college sports.
Thirty years of one president. In February 1978 the college hired Art DeCabooter, and he stayed until July 2008. Through his tenure enrollment nearly doubled and the campus grew its planetarium, culinary program and sciences; he also chaired the Scottsdale Chamber of Commerce, the Scottsdale Charros and the Rotary Club of Scottsdale, and sat on the McDowell Sonoran Preserve Commission. For a college the city did not govern, that was the channel through which Scottsdale’s civic network ran it anyway. He died in October 2019 at 78; the city named an amphitheater for him.
The years it nearly ended
There is no documented moment when the college came close to closing. It was a county institution with a tax base from the day it opened, which is the kind of founding that makes near-death rare. The closest things to a crisis in the record are the muddy, overcrowded opening of 1970–72 and the overcrowding of 1980, both problems of too many students rather than too few. If the lease has ever been in dispute, or the slide from the 1990 peak toward about 7,000 students today has threatened programs, that is not online.
What it set out to do, and what it does now
The STEP task force wanted a liberal arts college. What Scottsdale got was broader and better fitted to the people who actually enrolled: a comprehensive community college with a nursing program (accredited 1974–75), culinary arts (1982), a child care center (1975), the district’s first honors program (1972), a planetarium (2001) and a transfer pipeline to the state universities. The constituency broadened in two directions at once. By the early 1970s more of the district’s students were night students than day students, which is to say adults with jobs, and by the end of that decade the Community’s members had a standing invitation. The college describes itself today as a two-year public college on Native American land in partnership with the Community, which is not language the founders used, and the shift happened with the landlord in the room.
Who the record leaves out
The official story is a Scottsdale story, told by Scottsdale’s civic leaders about their two-year campaign, and the Community appears in it as a landlord who agreed. What is missing is the Community’s side of 1969: who sat on the Community Council, what the lease paid, what the Bureau of Indian Affairs promised, and whether 160 acres of the reservation’s best-located land was something members wanted to give up for a county college their children could not yet afford. The Community’s newspaper, O’odham Action News, covers the relationship today as a partnership, and the college’s commitments since 1970 suggest it has been negotiated continuously rather than settled once, but the negotiations are not public. Also missing are the students of 1972, named nowhere in the mascot story told about them every year, and the nine faculty of 1969.
What it didn’t have to become
The college did not have to be on the reservation, and if it had been built in Scottsdale almost everything distinctive about it would be gone. It would be another Maricopa campus on city land, with no landlord to answer to, no tuition waiver written into its founding year, no Indigenous Cultural Center and no reason for the Community’s newspaper to cover its presidents. Scottsdale would also have a college in its tax base and its zoning file. Instead the district took the one site option that put the college on land the city could never annex, and the Community became a permanent party to Scottsdale’s higher education. It is a fair guess, though only a guess, that the 1969 Council saw the lease as development rather than education; by the 1990s, when the same western edge filled with the Pavilions, the casino and the freeway, the college turned out to have been the first piece of a very different plan. The Artichoke, by contrast, was pure contingency: a protest vote that an administration tried to overturn and could not, which is the only reason anyone outside Arizona has heard of the place.