Mesa Community College
Overview and Administrative History
A Guide to the Mesa Community College Records
Overview of the Collection
Title: Mesa Community College Archives and Special Collection
Creator: Mesa Community College, Arizona
Dates: 1963-current
Extent: Approximately 150 linear feet
Abstract: Mesa Community College is part of the Maricopa County Community College District and started as an extension campus of Phoenix College in 1963. It was officially named Mesa Community College in 1965, and Dr. John D. Riggs was named the Executive Dean and President of the college. MCC opened at its current location at Southern and Dobson in 1966. The records include publications, meeting minutes, correspondence, promotional materials, photographs and other media.
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Administrative Information
Preferred Citation:
The Mesa Community College Archives and Special Collections, Department of the Library, Mesa Community College, Mesa, AZ.
Acquisition
The papers, photographs, and media are part of the college’s institutional and historical record.
Processing Information
Part of the collection was first processed using a variation of Library of Congress cataloging, which was called the Dixie Decimal System. There was an effort during this time to acquire materials for the collection, which is why some areas of the collection are more heavily represented during this time period than others. In 2017, the collection was re-processed into traditional Archival order along with hundreds of items that had been acquired but never processed into the collection after their acquisition. Up until this point, items had been acquired without transfer forms or a Collection Policy. These were also created during the 2017-2020 processing period.
Digitization of the newly processed collection began in Summer 2018. The photo collection was first digitally scanned by library staff beginning in the mid 2000s. The digital files were held on an external hard drive with no recognizable naming convention, and no connection to the images’ locations in the physical collection. This 2018 digitization project began from scratch and we only digitized materials that had already been processed so that the digitized images could be linked to their physical location within the collection. It was decided that photographs, faculty bulletins, yearbooks, and the school newspaper would be scanned and eventually made publicly accessible. It was soon determined that because of size and volume of the collections, the yearbooks, school newspaper, and faculty bulletins would be digitized by a commercial service, while photographs would continue to be digitized in-house.
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Administrative History
The Maricopa County Community College District began in 1962 with an overwhelming vote in the General election. Before this, Phoenix Union High School District offered the only junior college program in Maricopa County. In 1963, Mesa Community College operated as an extension campus of Phoenix College at 809 W. Main Street in Mesa.
In 1965, Mesa Community College was officially named and plans were in place to purchase land for its future site. Dr. John D. Riggs became the first Executive Dean and President of MCC. The MCC student government voted the HoKam as the campus mascot to honor the Hohokam native people, its first school newspaper was the Cub Reporter, 330 students registered for classes in the first semester at MCC, and there were 27 students in the first commencement ceremony in June 1965.
In 1966, the campus opened at its current site at Southern and Dobson with the student center, science building, a maintenance building and 26 portable classrooms. They quickly added additional, permanent buildings and courses of study to the campus as enrollment grew to 4,424 day students and 2,905 night students by 1970. When the original MCC building project was completed in December 1969, there was a technology building, social science building, faculty office, business education building and a gymnasium. The football stadium was also dedicated that year. During this time, Scottsdale Community College opened as a Mesa Community College Extension.
In the 1970s, the Outback Theatre, the Performing Arts Center, and the Child Care Center all opened on campus. The MCC mascot changed from the HoKam to the Thunderbird, and both academic and athletic teams were competing in, and winning, championships throughout the state and region. In 1974, Dr. Riggs retired and Helena Howe was appointed MCC President , the first female President in the Maricopa County College District. In 1978, Theo Heap was appointed the MCC President, and he served in that role until 1984.
The end of the 1970s and into the 1980s saw more growth in construction, course offerings, and social awareness at MCC. MCC offered improved services for the disabled community, returning veterans, women entering college, and cultural diversity. In 1984, Wallace Simpson was appointed MCC President. In 1985, the Chandler-Gilbert Center began operation at the old Seton Catholic High School as an extension of MCC. In the same year, the MCCCD Board approved the purchase of land at McKellips and Bush Highway for the Red Mountain MCC campus to begin development after 1994.
Construction on new and remodeled buildings at MCC continues throughout the 1980s. The Chandler/Gilbert Community College Center opened in 1987, and Larry Christiansen was appointed MCC president in 1988, and MCC enrollment peaked that year at 19,577.
In 1997, the MCC East Campus known as the Red Mountain Campus opened for 700 students in temporary facilities, and in 2001, the Red Mountain Campus had its Grand Opening. MCC is the first of ten colleges in the MCCCD to have two campuses. In 2004, MCC enrollment reached nearly 28,000 students at the two campuses and five extended sites. With that in mind, MCCD and Mesa City Council begin plans for an MCC Downtown campus.
In 2008, Dr. Shouan Pan became the sixth president of MCC, and he served in this position until 2016.
In 2016, Sasan Pureetezadi became the interim president until Dr. Richard Haney assumed the role of president of the college from July 2018 through the beginning of 2020. Lori Berquam was selected as the interim president and took over the role on February 1, 2020.
(A more detailed Chronology can be found in the collection in RG 3 SG 8 Box 1)
Scope and Content
The Mesa Community College Archives is organized and arranged into distinct record groups based on the type of records rather than the offices of origin. This is mainly because of the lack of transfer paperwork, identifying notes, and organization. A small portion of the collection was originally organized according to a made-up Dewey Decimal system, while the majority of the materials were still unprocessed in folders, drawers, and boxes without any transfer paperwork or collection policy. All of the materials were then reorganized into a traditional archival order represented in this finding aid.
Consistent coverage of official college records in the collection is poor. There are no official records for any MCC office, department or program, including the Office of the President. As a result, the existing records vary greatly in substance and size. Some time periods and topics are covered extensively, while others have only single folders or none at all.
Digitization began in order to increase access and preserve the physical collection by reducing handling and direct contact.
Coverage of the MCC Administration is poor overall. The best coverage of Office of the President correspondence is for Dr. John Riggs from 1965-1973. Because these papers cover the beginning of the school’s history, there is an item-level description of the Dr. Rigg boxes in the Finding Aid. There is also good coverage of the Dean of Instruction from 1967-1973. After that, coverage for the MCC Presidents is spotty with only one box of correspondence from Helena Howe from 1976-1978. Larry Christiansen has only one folder of correspondence, but a good collection of his Weekly Communiques from 2000-2007. There is no correspondence for Theo Heap (1978-1984) or Wallace Simpson (1984-1988). Dr. Shouan Pan’s (2008-2016) paper records consist only of the “College Community” communication newsletter from 2008-2013.
Coverage of the Business and Administrative Services is poor with a few exceptions. The Public Safety reports are extensive from 2004-2015. There is a complete set of faculty handbooks from 1966-2009 and student handbooks from 1965-2016. Class catalogs and schedules coverage is good with most from 1965-2015. Most of the Students Services have only a handful of items, and much of that are brochures or handouts. There is a good representation of MCC brochures and promotional materials, along with MCC Fast Facts booklets.
The Athletic Department is covered best in the earlier years of MCC. There are quite a few programs, schedules and articles that cover the major college sporting events: football, basketball, and baseball. Some of the other sports are mentioned in small sampling, if at all. There is a brief history of the MCC Athletic Program along with a Women’s Athletics retrospective. There are also MCC Athletic program publications like MCC Hokams, T-Bird Talk and Sports Shorts. There was also a serious effort to collect MCC sports clippings from various newspapers around the state between 1979-2001. Unfortunately, many of the sources and exact dates of these clippings are not included in the finished collection. The other Departments are not as well documented in the Archives with the exception of the Library and Theatre Outback programs and “Mom” news sheets.
The Committees/Organizations record group has some groups that have generally good collections of their meeting minutes, the Associated Student Governing Board, the Faculty Senate, the Curriculum Committee all have fairly consistent coverage of their minutes. There are other committees and organizations that have some informational materials represented in this record group.
The Publications record group has the complete yearbook collection from 1965-1977. The Faculty Bulletin has almost consistent coverage from 1963-2009. The school newspaper underwent a number of name changes throughout the years but was mostly called The Legend and ran from 1964-current. There are scatterings of many different departmental and organization newsletters along with some MCC literary arts magazines and anthologies.
The Events record group has a fairly complete collection of commencement programs but is missing all of the 1970s. Other events coverage is more limited because there didn’t seem to be any consistency for collecting these materials.
The Red Mountain Campus record group comes out of the creation of this campus from the original MCC campus. The coverage here is limited to materials that relate to the creation of the campus and there is little to no coverage of the campus since it opened.
The Oral Interviews were originally in the form of cassette tapes, which can be found in the Media collection. They were part of a larger project by Richard Fenagle who used them to write his book on the history of Maricopa County Community College District. These 5 interviews were the only ones that were found in the Mesa CC archives. Most of the audio tapes were transcribed during processing for easier access because the sound quality is not very good. The only one not transcribed because of extremely poor sound quality is the interview with Millie Noble.
The Photograph collection consists of mostly black and white photographs as early as the beginning of construction of Mesa Community College and goes through the early 2000s. Any identifiers such as years and names of people or events were taken from the backs of the photographs or from the envelopes that they had been stored in and were so identified before they were processed. Because the photographs were processed as they were found and because so many are undated, sections (especially SG 1--Events) are not organized chronologically.
The Media collection consists mostly of DVDs and VHS tapes of various events and promotional clips from MCC. The collection includes MCC graduation ceremonies from 1990-2004. During processing, the media was viewed for clarity and content, and the finding aid includes those processing notes for each of the items. All copies of a particular item were kept until these can be digitized or transferred onto a more stable format.
The Negatives collection is mainly from the negatives that were left to the Archives by MCC photographer Don Koonce. These are mostly from photographs that were taken in the 1970s and 1980s. There is also a random selection of negatives found both with their photographs and alone. As with the photographs, identifying information such as subject and dates were taken directly from the handwritten notes on their storage envelopes.
The Slides collection is housed separately from the negatives and is very slim. A few of the topics in the slides collection are also in the negative or photograph collections, but the larger portion is not in either of the collections at the time of processing. Special note can be made for the slides of MCC on Wheels, Family Easter Day and the Unity Picnic, which are not represented anywhere else in the collection.