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When Wilfred P. Leon Guerrero uprooted his wife and five children from Guam in 1968 to pursue his doctorate in the continental United States, he became the fifth Chamorro, the island's major ethnic group, to pursue a terminal degree. "It was like learning to swim," says Mr. Leon Guerrero, who served as the president of the University of Guam from 1988 to 1993.
Mr. Leon Guerrero sold his car to pay for seven plane tickets so his wife and children could go with him to Greeley, Colo., where he attended the University of Northern Colorado on a scholarship from the Guam government. To support his family, he worked evenings in a fishing-pole factory. After he returned to Guam four years later with a doctorate in education, he taught at the University of Guam, among professors who had been recruited from the American mainland. He was treated like royalty in the Chamorro community: "Everyone assumed that I knew everything," he says.
Since Mr. Leon Guerrero earned his doctorate, many other Chamorros -- Guam inhabitants who migrated from what is now Indonesia and Malaysia more than 2,000 years ago -- have followed. Now some Chamorros worry that this hard-earned progress is being chipped away by the University of Guam's new president, as he attempts to reshape the university.
Harold L. Allen, who lived on Guam for 13 years as a child but has spent most of the rest of his life in the United States, is the first non-Chamorro to lead the 51-year-old university, and a controversial figure.
Mr. Allen has made some sweeping changes on the campus, collapsing three colleges into one, for instance, and in the process demoting several deans. Although the Faculty Senate voted in favor of the restructuring, Mr. Allen's critics say the way he handled the demotions was insensitive to Chamorro culture and exacerbated longstanding ethnic tensions.
"Universities are unwieldy animals," says John C. Salas, a former president and current tourism professor at the university. Some faculty members are finding it difficult to "have a new guy come and change things overnight."
His supporters counter that Mr. Allen, who took over leadership of the university in 2001, is the first truly independent president the university has had, at an institution that...