“If you want to stick your nose under the tent, don’t be surprised
if somebody grabs both of your ears and drags you in.”

For the third piece in this series, Ernest Calderón (AZ ’77), a prominent Arizona lawyer and current president of the Arizona Board of Regents, was interviewed by Christopher Sopher (VA ’10), undergraduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Calderón has worked as a lawyer for more than 25 years in both private and public practice. He served as President of the State Bar of Arizona and in 2002 was named “National Latino Lawyer of the Year” by the National Hispanic Bar Association. He has been appointed to public service roles by seven Arizona governors from both political parties and worked on issues from juvenile justice to early childhood education. He was appointed by former Arizona Governor Janet Napolitano (NM ’77) to the Arizona Board of Regents, which oversees the state’s public university system. Since July 2009 he has served as the board’s president, leading its work on college access and affordability. Calderón graduated from Northern Arizona University and the University of Arizona law school.

Sopher is an undergraduate and Morehead-Cain Scholar at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he studies public policy. He helped start the national college mentoring organization Strive for College, and founded and ran its chapter at UNC. He spent the 2008 year working for the Obama for America campaign. He blogs about youth issues at www.youngerthinking.com.

How do you navigate political party? You’re a Democrat, so if a Republican asks you to serve in a public role, how do you decide whether you want to do that?

For me, the thought process is: the greater good is neither Republican nor Democrat. The greater good is whatever the right thing to do is. If I have a Republican governor that comes to me and says that they have a particular task force they want me to lead, or a particular job they’d like me to help them with, I ask myself: “Who’s this going to benefit?” If it’s going to benefit the public, then I’m willing to do it, even over the objection of people in my own party. I really believe my duty as a citizen and certainly as a Truman Scholar is to try to make life better for the citizenry, so if I can contribute to a solution, then it’s my duty.

Applying that idea to your current role as president of the Arizona Board of Regents, what were your starting goals?

We focused on accessibility and affordability issues. And we’ve made a pretty good cut at it.

So access and cost are the key issues right now?

Greater access was my theme. Cost is a component of that. Geographic location is another; cyberspace accessibility was another. We strove every possible way to ensure that, for example, people in the military who had taken courses in the military would now receive credit in our university systems for those courses. We put together “3 + 1” programs where we jointly admit students their freshman year along with a community college.  They complete the first two years at the community college. The third year they complete at the community college but we control the curriculum. The fourth year they go to the four-year university at the full rate but they are guaranteed matriculation at the end of that year. So essentially they spend three years of community college tuition and one year of university tuition and they get a bachelor’s degree. That reduces the cost of higher education by about 60 percent.

That’s been successful?

So far, yes. We started on my watch this year and so far it’s been very successful.

We were also talking about more online outreach. Our universities now are probably at the forefront of the country, probably in the top 25 universities in online courses. So if you live on the reservation someplace and you can’t afford to travel to Flagstaff or Tucson or Phoenix, many courses are online now. All you need is Internet access. We’ve even helped with that, trying to provide more Internet access to those places on the reservations that don’t have Internet access.

And we’re doing a comprehensive effort to ensure that we have more branch campuses located geographically around the state. As it is now, we have Arizona State University, which has 68,000 students in Tempe. We have the University of Arizona, which has about 35,000 students in Tucson, and we have Northern Arizona University which has about 22,000 students in Flagstaff. But there’s a whole lot of Arizona in between those places. So we’re going to try to ensure that we set up branch campuses, either in conjunction with an existing community college or just freestanding. In the case of NAU, we went ahead and created a campus in a city library in Prescott Valley, Arizona. We got the community college to join as well, so if you live in that rural area, all you have to do is go to the city library and you can take community college courses, a university course. You can even apply for some limited Bachelor’s degree programs and complete your entire education there, which would make it very affordable.

On affordability, I feel safe saying a sizable number of Truman Scholars are concerned about this issue in one way or another: as current or former students, as parents, as people with loans, as parents of kids who will be taking loans. In your experience, what are the obstacles and some of the possible solutions to bringing down the cost of higher education?

The things I just mentioned are tremendously important. The geographic location changes allow you to go to school without moving away and having to pay room and board and that sort of thing. Online courses do the same thing. And the “3 + 1” program knocks about 60 percent off [a student’s] education costs. So those are significant by themselves.

And they were not easy to do. There’s a variety of people who like to hang on to past traditions. And anything other than “desk time” in one of our established physical locations is seen by them as being “less,” when in this new world it really means “more.” We’ve got to see more state and federal aid to higher education. Arizona is 48th in the country for state student financial aid. State student financial aid is very, very important. If you look at Georgia and you look at Arkansas, they both have stellar programs of student financial aid. Those are the sort of models we need to move toward.

Another thing we need to do to make school more affordable is to eliminate the remedial work that our universities are doing. We have a lot of students that come to the universities unprepared for university studies. They might have sailed through high school, but somebody did them a disservice by not adequately preparing them for college. So one thing we can do is bolster our K-12 system so that students are taught more rigorously, they have higher standards.

So what would you ask people reading this interview—the average or the interested person—to do to address some of these needs?

The average person should get involved politically Whether they run for office, help a neighbor run for office, or just get involved in candidate debates, they need to support legislative candidates that are willing to place education, particularly higher education, on the front burner. I think we’ve seen a trend in the country where you’ve seen a greater amount of support over the last two decades go to corrections than to higher education. It was probably needed in the corrections area, but now I think it’s time for the pendulum to swing the other way and invest in education.

The only way legislators will invest in education is if they find you and your neighbor calling and saying, “Hey, I’d like you to support our universities and our education. Why are you cutting taxes when my seventh grader’s middle school doesn’t have adequate supplies?”

Let’s shift gears. You’ve had a very long career in law in many capacities: private, public, government. What advice would you offer other Truman Scholars interested in law, about where the leverage points are in the legal profession, about how they can make the greatest public service contribution?

If the person is already a law student, the advice I’d give them is something I wish had been given to me. That is: when you come out of law school, get a job, even if it’s for a brief period—one year—where you actually have to try a case. Where you actually have to present a set of facts to a jury, you have to persuade a jury, you have to get a judge to rule on things. The reason I say that is you learn a lot about human nature when you try a case. You learn about what motivates people, you learn a lot about what turns people off. You learn to distill down a complex set of facts into something that the jury can absorb and determine what to do. Along with that, once you’ve tried a case, if you become an advocate of any sort, you have no fear anymore of something going to trial.

You’d be amazed at the liberation you have when somebody says to you, “Well, we’re going to try to block your homeless shelter and take you to court over it.” When they told me that when I was working on trying to get a homeless shelter built in Phoenix, I said, “That’s great. Let’s go to a jury.” And they said, “What are you talking about?” And I said, “Well, if you want to file a lawsuit to try and stop us, go ahead. But my first words to a jury are going to be, ‘What you do to the least of my brethren you do to me.’ And we’re trying to take care of the least of our brethren.” As soon as they heard that, they relented. Now I wouldn’t have been able to do that had I not faced a jury before.

So spend a year in the public defender’s office or the county attorney’s office. Or find a law firm that’ll teach you how to try a case, and do that. Then after that you’ve got the fundamentals down. You have seen Armageddon.

Now let’s say you’re not a law student. I would ask myself, what is my passion? Some people go to law school because they want a job that pays well. There’s nothing wrong with that, but you can be very miserable in life and be well-paid. Try to find something in law that really gets you passionate about life. If you find that, the law will be very interesting for you, very vibrant, and less tedious.

And what was that thing for you?

I grew up in segregated housing. I’m Hispanic—they called us the “Mexicans”—and where I grew up we had to live in a certain place. The company owned all the housing—it was a copper mining company—and so the Mexicans had to live in a certain place, and the two black families had to live next door to each other, and the Native Americans—Apaches, Navajo— had to live in a certain place. And I grew up thinking, “this isn’t fair. We’re being judged by the color of our skin.”

So I gravitated to those parts of the law where I can help, particularly in education. I see myself as an equal opportunity person to—either through the law or civic activities—inject myself when I see somebody’s not being treated fairly.

So I’ll ask the obligatory Arizona question about fairness: SB 1070 [the Arizona immigration enforcement law of recent attention]. What is going on, where do you think that is headed?

SB 1070 is incredibly popular here in Arizona. I think that shows there’s a great deal of frustration with the Obama administration for not doing something about it. The Obama administration promised that in year one, they would pursue immigration reform. It never happened. It still hasn’t happened. So what you’ve seen is an overreaction in Arizona to the fact that we have an immigration problem. We have immigrants who are here, hardworking, good people, but they are putting a strain on our infrastructure—health care, city services, whatever. There’s also a very small percentage of immigrants who are here in the criminal element. They victimize everybody, particularly fellow Hispanics. And then you have a segment of our community in Arizona—a small, vocal community—who just don’t like these people because they look different. And when you add all those things together, you have the perfect storm.

That’s what prompted Senate Bill 1070. Twenty-five percent of Hispanics in Arizona support SB 1070. Twenty-five percent. So that tells you that even the Hispanic community thinks that the system is broken. The federal government’s going to try to enjoin the application of the statute, and we’ll see if they’re successful. But ultimately the President of the United States and the Congress have to come up with some immigration reform. We’ve got to allow those hardworking immigrations who are here to become legal. They’re paying taxes already, so let’s get them to pay more taxes, just like everyone else. And then we need to have real stern punishment for the criminal element that comes over. None of that is happening. That’s why 1070 was passed.

You’ve spent your entire career in Arizona. I know many younger Truman Scholars feel conflicted about that. They want to stay in their home states and do public service work, but they also feel this draw to Washington or other major cities. What advice would you give Scholars making those decisions?

Go with your heart. As you get older, it’s more difficult to get to Washington. You’ll have a mortgage, you’ll have family commitments. So if there is somebody that really loves Washington, then consider trying to get a job there early in your career. You have to remember that Washington draws the best and the brightest, and you might be the head of a government agency or a county attorney in Iowa, but when you get to Washington you’re probably three or four steps below that, because there are other people who got there before you. So if you’re willing to work your way up slowly, Washington is a great incubator. Sooner or later, though, you don’t become effective in Washington unless you have left Washington at some point, and gone to your home community and served.

What advice would you give Truman Scholars who are interested in education: policy, administration, higher education?

Now’s the time. If you’re interested in education policy, our country is at a crossroads. We have declining financial resources for it. I would have people get involved, if they like K-12 education, by attending school board meetings. Find the parent groups who are organizing about school sites and management and that sort of thing. If there is a local department of education, contact them and find out what task forces are going on. Attend the meetings. If you know a politician who can appoint you, get appointed to a task force or committee to attack a problem.

If you’re interested in higher education, contact the Board of Trustees or Board of Regents and say you’d like to be involved. I’ve received many people and plugged them in wherever I could. It’s an open door. Higher education policy is an open door for two reasons. Right now we’re at a crossroads, and things are ripe for change. Second, education is a very open system in this country. If you want to stick your nose under the tent, don’t be surprised if somebody grabs both of your ears and drags you in.

If you would like to conduct an interview or write a feature for the Truman Scholars Blog, please contact news@trumanscholars.org.