The University of Arizona Press
October 10, 2024
The University of Arizona: A History in 100 Stories is a celebration of the people, ideas, inventions, teaching, and structures that have been part of the school’s evolution from a small land-grant institution to an internationally renowned research institution. Drawing on half a century of connection with the University of Arizona as a student, staff member, and faculty member, Gregory McNamee presents a history through the lens of a hundred subjects. Today we ask McNamee five questions about his book.
What’s a favorite undergraduate moment?
Tucson is a friendly, laid-back town, and when I landed here in 1975 it was immediately apparent that someone forget to tell it that the 1960s were over. One of my favorite moments at the University came when I enrolled as an undergraduate on a hot August day. As I was walking down the olive-tree-lined path along Park Avenue, two bands were setting up on the back of a flatbed truck for a welcome-to-campus concert, Summerdog and the Bob Meighan Band, who were favorites of campus and community alike and who gave extraordinary performances for a body of bobbing, dancing students, many of them as disoriented as I was in the brand-new world of college. I later became friends with players in both bands. Anyway, that capped off my first day here, when, gathering punch cards to get into classes, I met several young men and women who remain dear friends to this very day. Many of them turn up in my book.
Not a moment so much as a series of moments was the delightful fact that on almost any evening on campus during my undergraduate years (1975–78) there was something going on: a lecture from a world-class visiting scholar in Social Sciences, a poetry reading in the Modern Languages Auditorium; a musical, dance, or theatrical performance in what became Centennial Hall; some great film in the Gallagher Theater. Within the space of a few months, if memory serves, I saw Spanish director Victor Erice’s life-changing film Spirit of the Beehive and Werner Herzog’s Aguirre, the Wrath of God, as well as repeated showings of the mind-blowing 2001, Allegro Non Troppo, and the collected works of the Marx Brothers; attended poetry readings by W. S. Merwin, Czeslaw Milosz, Joseph Brodsky, Lucille Clifton, and Seamus Heaney, among many others; heard fiery lectures by William Kunstler, Angela Davis, and Noam Chomsky, as well as a slurred one by Hunter S. Thompson; went to a Pink Floyd light-and-sound show at Flandrau and several great rock concerts at the Senior Ballroom; and talked about every possible topic there was to talk about late into the night, night after night, over coffee at the Student Union or beer at Mrs. O’Leary’s Cow down on Fourth Avenue.
University of Arizona vs. University of Wisconsin men’s basketball game at McKale Center.
I don’t want to sound like too much of a cranky old guy, though I am certainly that, but back in those happy days before students glued themselves to cell phones and social media, it was possible to have a happy life with orders of magnitude more actual social interaction. In any event, I could fit an awful lot into my schedule: take a full course load, work a part-time job, keep my grades up, and even get a little sleep from time to time while enjoying all that the campus had to offer.
One hundred stories is a lot of history. Will you share a bonus 101st story, perhaps one that didn’t make it into the book?
Well, it’s telling tales out of school, as the old saying goes, but back in the day I hung out from time to time with several friends who lived at the old grad-student apartments in the Babcock Building, which I believe became office space for a couple of decades and then became a dorm again. One of the residents was a friend of a friend, Barbara Kingsolver, whom I got to know. While the rest of us were hanging out down by the pool, jawboning about politics or literature or whatever until midnight, I could hear Barbara typing away in her room up on the second floor. Just a few years later her first novel, The Bean Trees, appeared, and the race was on. Every now and then I reflect on what might have happened if I’d gone home and hit the typewriter myself on a Saturday night, but things have worked out pretty well.
Thinking about what you call the four foundational pillars at the U of A—agriculture, mining & geology, astronomy, and anthropology—what is a great example of a modern research achievement from one of these areas of study?
Ten-odd years ago, my friend Neal Armstrong, now a retired Regents Professor of Chemistry, invited me to come up to the UA experimental farm in Maricopa, 85 or so miles northwest of Tucson, to see what appeared to be the world’s largest scanner. Some fifty feet high, it weighs thirty tons and moves along steel rails over crop rows the length of four football fields. Those fields contain thousands of sensors, reading data from forty-two thousand plants below, about five terabytes a day. The numbers are then crunched to determine which plants are thriving under experimental conditions that are expected to resemble the future climate. Those plants that produce good yields are then selected for breeding, while those that fail are pulled. Darwinism in action, that.
TERRA (Transportation Energy Resources from Renewable Agriculture), as it’s called, represents the confluence of three important areas of research, conducted by scientists from many disciplines: energy, water, and food. We’re likely to be scrambling for energy, unless we go fully renewable, in the next quarter century; we’re likely to find that water is ever scarcer; and in the year 2100, by most estimates, the human population of the world will stand at nearly 11 billion people, about a third more people than are alive today. All of them need to eat, so TERRA, helping select crops that will do best under arduous conditions, is a potential life-saver and world-changer. As I say in the book, it’s a matter of life and death.
Agricultural analysis machine that is part of the TERRA program.
The other pillars have done more than their share to keep up with the modern world. But growing food is perhaps the most important thing humans can do, and it pleases me that our school’s very first pillar, agriculture, is such an important part of the planet’s future.
What is the most surprising thing you learned about the University of Arizona while writing this book?
I wouldn’t say I learned it so much as appreciated it more while writing the book, but one of the underlying themes of my book is the power of interdisciplinarity in research and study. Years before it became standard, UA scholars were going from building to building, anthropologists talking with economists, space scientists cooking up projects with hydrologists, physicians teaming up with physicists, writers collaborating with dancers and photographers and musicians, and professors and administrators such as John Schaefer, a chemist, making room in his schedule as UA president to teach a humanities course. Much of the intellectual richness of our school—and it’s always yielded an embarrassment of intellectual riches—comes from that kind of interdisciplinary work, leaving the rigid confines of supposed fields for the freedom of the highway, if you’ll forgive the tortured metaphor.
What is your current writing project?
I have a superstition against talking about work in progress, since it’s altogether too easy to talk all the energy out of the writing, to go out to lunch one time too often on a good anecdote and eventually get so sick of your stories that you want nothing less than to repeat them on the page. I’ve seen it happen many times, not least with my old friend Dick Tuck, scourge of Richard Nixon, who would have had a ten-thousand-page memoir in him if he’d only stopped talking and started writing.
I will let on, though, that I’m hoping to focus my next book on a certain animal that’s a distant cousin of the wildcat rather than on the capital-W Wildcats of the current book.
Apart from that, each month I pull together a Substack newsletter called World Bookcase, four or five thousand words of musing about whatever topics in history, culture, language, food, travel, and suchlike matters happen to be catching my interest at the moment. New subscribers are always welcome!
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About the Author
Gregory McNamee is the author or editor of more than forty books and author of more than ten thousand periodical pieces. He is a contributing editor to the Encyclopaedia Britannica and a contributing writer to Kirkus Reviews, and his writing and photographs have appeared in dozens of magazines and online publications. McNamee is a former lecturer in the Department of Economics at the University of Arizona and is a longtime traveling speaker for AZHumanities.
