This spring, the halls of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Kuskokwim Campus (KuC) were lined with names.
“We have the names of all of the people who have graduated with either a GED all the way up through a PhD,” said Cindy Andrecheck, the writing center coordinator for the Bethel campus. “You can see they just go on, and on, and on, and on.”
In all, over 3,500 people have received certificates, occupational endorsements, Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) certifications, associate degrees, masters degrees, and PhDs at the Kuskokwim Campus since it started.
Andrecheck has been in Bethel for nearly all of that 50 year history.
“I've lived in Bethel since 1975,” Andrecheck said.
Andrecheck liked Bethel the moment she got off the airplane as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer. She started working at KuC the next year.
“I am the unofficial historian of KuC,” Andrecheck said with a laugh. “I have boxes of archives in my office.”
It’s a position Andrecheck said that she got “through attrition.” Others at the campus have worked there for longer – she took a break from the late 1970s to the early 2000s – but her history goes back the furthest.
“Of course, in the beginning KuC had nothing,” Andrecheck said. “We didn't have a building, we had nothing at all, space was rented all over Bethel to conduct classes and to house the director.”
At the time, students were housed all over town with families until the campus rented out what are now the Willow Tree Apartments. Finally, the campus got a 38-person dorm in 1984 with the help of local George Holman and Sen. John Sackett of Ruby.
The beginnings
KuC started out as the Kuskokwim Community College, based in villages around the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta and communicating by high frequency radio between the satellite classrooms.
“There was one phone in the village, if it worked,” Andrecheck said. “There was of course no internet, no computers, no cell phones, none of that stuff at all.”
Because of the challenges of delivering education over the miles of tundra, the Kuskokwim Campus was an early adopter of distance learning models. One was live instructional television, beamed from KYUK to some of the closer villages that could receive the signal.
“So we started out with this wonderful program called ‘Let's Speak English,’” Andrecheck explained. “This is the 1970s, so there were a lot of non-English speakers in the [Yukon-Kuskokwim] Delta. And especially a lot of the Elders were wanting to learn to speak a little bit better English, because, you know, it was kind of a skill that was necessary. So we created the show.”
“The premise was that a Martian had come down to Earth and met up with this German fellow. And the other two characters were teaching those two non-speakers English, and it was a very funny show,” Andrecheck said.
Many of Andrecheck’s favorite memories of the Kuskokwim Campus come from that era.
“During the instructional live TV days, when we had that ‘Let's Speak English’ program, it was the very last program for the season. And Mary Whittaker, who was the head of the program at the time, was the hostess of the show. And at the very end, and again, this is live TV broadcast for, like, 12 villages, got a pie in the face,” Andrecheck said with a laugh.
Those were wild days of television, Andrecheck said. “We also had 'Pat’s Corner,' which was the cooperative extension agent Pat Barker. Again, it's live TV, and she was sort of the Julia Childs of the day. And she would be making things, and dropping eggs on the floor, and all that kind of stuff too. And then just keep going like nothing happened.”
Through a combination of television, live phone instruction, and village instructors, the Kuskokwim Campus taught vocational education, surveying, construction trades, welding, small motor repair, and other office occupations – over 120 classes taught by 125 adjunct professors. It was a groundbreaking model.
“When we started our distance delivery program, we had people coming from all over the world to model our program, to see what it was like and to go back home and model it in rural areas in their own countries,” Andrecheck said.
Andrecheck said that surveying was especially popular in the early days. It was the era immediately following the landmark Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act (ANCSA), and there was much surveying to be done.
"A true higher education institution"
When the price of oil crashed in the late 1980s, the mission of the campus, and the classes offered, shifted as the University of Alaska Fairbanks reorganized. That’s when it moved from a community college offering community-oriented classes to what Andrecheck calls a “true higher education institution.”
“Bethel, of course, is the hub of the [Yukon-Kuskokwim] Delta. There [are] 50 plus villages in our service area. And it just was a really logical move back in the 70s, when it was started, to have a place where people didn't have to go so far away from home. They could stay within their own zone, their own culture. People are here that they know and they feel comfortable with,” Andrecheck said.
“It's really hard for a lot of our village students to succeed, thrown cold into a large campus when they grew up in a village and they graduated with maybe 20 or 30 students or even less,” Andrecheck said. “So it's very comfortable for folks. And it's easy for them to go home on the weekend if they're feeling homesick, or want their mother's cooking or whatever. So it's a really good and logical place to have a rural campus.”
During the 50th commencement ceremony in May, Orutsararmiut Native Council Traditional Chief Ignatius “Louie” Andrew said that it was uplifting and spiritual to see the impact of half a century of higher education in Bethel. He was one of the first to graduate from the campus, studying behavioral sciences.
“Back then we were a skeleton crew. Not very big. But now – beautiful changes. I'm glad for our people and for the rest of the state of Alaska,” Andrew said.
The Zoom Era
For Andrecheck, the unofficial historian, 50 years of the campus means that it’s not a flash in the pan.
“We have something for everyone,” Andrecheck said, “And you can see by the names [on the walls], we've served a lot of people over the years in a lot of different capacities. So I think the community as a whole should be extremely proud to have an organization in its midst that has helped so many people, and the people have helped KuC survive over the years because without students and without programs, you know, we wouldn't be here.”
But Andrecheck said that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed a lot at the campus.
“Now we're in the Zoom Era,” Andrecheck said. Looking to the future, she hopes more can come back in-person to the campus. Some of the campus’ cohort programs include multigenerational education, with Elders teaching and learning in classrooms – a program that benefits from face-to-face interaction. Plus, she said, there’s more to college than classes.
“It's not about taking classes and getting a degree or certificate,” Andrecheck explained. “It's about all of the other stuff that happens as, as you are a college student. It's all the interaction, all of meeting all of these people that you would not otherwise meet. You form bonds when you're in college that continue for your whole entire life. And it's – you can't do that on Zoom.”
And, Andrecheck said, staff miss having so many students on campus experiencing the college atmosphere.
A lot of different things
Whether instructional television, village classes, phone sessions, or over Zoom, Andrecheck said that it’s hard to truly quantify the impact the Kuskokwim Campus has had on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta over its 50 years.
“It's a lot of different things for a lot of different people. I don't think it's the same thing for everyone,” Andrecheck said.
And for a few people, it’s even meant a way to return home. They studied at the Kuskokwim Campus, went out to receive further higher education, and then came back to work in Bethel, where it all started.
KYUK’s Evan Erickson contributed to this reporting.