Northern Arizona University

The campus spreading across the ponderosa pines at the north end of Flagstaff began as something considerably more modest: a two-building teacher training school that opened in September of eighteen ninety-nine with twenty-three students, two faculty members, and two sheepskin-bound dictionaries. It was called Northern Arizona Normal School, and it was the third and final institution of higher education established in the Arizona Territory, coming a decade and a half after the University of Arizona in Tucson and what would eventually become Arizona State.

The mission was practical and urgent. Arizona's rural districts had a severe shortage of trained teachers, and the territorial legislature established the Flagstaff school precisely because the population was scattered across vast distances, and teachers had to come from somewhere. The first graduating class, in nineteen oh one, consisted of four women who received teaching certificates and scattered across the territory to run one-room schools in mining towns and cattle country.

The institution evolved as Arizona changed. It became Arizona State Teachers College at Flagstaff in nineteen twenty-five as its curriculum broadened, and in nineteen sixty-six the Arizona Board of Regents granted it full university status. The setting shaped the school's identity: surrounded by the largest contiguous ponderosa pine forest in the world and two hours from the Grand Canyon's South Rim, NAU developed particular strengths in environmental science, forestry, and Indigenous education, reflecting the landscape it inhabits and the communities around it.

Among the notable figures associated with NAU: Clyde Tombaugh, the discoverer of Pluto, spent his later career in the Southwest after his transformative years at nearby Lowell Observatory. Katie Hobbs, the current governor of Arizona, is a graduate. And the university helped establish Flagstaff as the world's first International Dark Sky City in two thousand one, a designation that grew directly from the astronomical heritage of the mesa to the west.