College Times

Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: News

Media Credit: Courtesy of Necochea Family

When David Lopez, the president of National Hispanic University, was searching for an academic co-pilot last summer, he didn't know he'd get the real thing.

Lopez drove over to nearby Reid-Hillview airport in East San Jose to pick up candidate Juan Necochea, a respected professor and his wife Maureen, who had flown in from Southern California. When Lopez introduced himself in the terminal, Necochea said, "Come over and see my plane and meet my wife. We built it ourselves."

The stunned Lopez approached the sleek, two-seater and thought to himself, "Is this damn thing safe?"

The two men hit it off immediately. Necochea won the job, becoming provost of the only accredited Latino college in the United States. Today, two months after leaving his cushy professorship at California State University at San Marcos, he's still delighted about his decision, and so is Lopez.

"I came here because I see a powerhouse" Necochea says of the school that only won accreditation six years ago. "I feel this resonance, a spirituality, between myself and this university."

Necochea and Lopez want to grow and turn the tiny, 600-student college into an elite school for the nation's future Hispanic leaders - a daunting task that has lit a fresh fire under the new provost.

"I guess I needed a new challenge," he says. "I left a stable, secure position to come here, but the time was right and it's a mission I believe in.'

Necochea's office at NHU is rather sparse. Aside from a couple of photos of his two airplanes, there's a sailing poster titled "Courage." Another poster features a Luis Miguel song about dreams, and impressive looking papier mache figures of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza stand on his desk.

Necochea, 53, is quick to smile through a closely cropped full beard. A star wrestler in high school, he still looks stocky and strong. He speaks English with a flavorful Chicano-Mexicano accent acquired living along California's bilingual border.

Born on the other side, in dusty Mexicali, Necochea never attended school until his farmworker parents moved the family north to Calexico. When he wasn't picking crops or wrestling, the young Necochea managed to earn high grades for the wrong reason - simply to remain eligible to wrestle.

"I wasn't academic at all," he recalled. "I wanted to be a mechanic, maybe go to a junior college."

Continued...

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