On Friday, November 14, Interim Chancellor Laura Clark gave her talk at the university’s Rapert Library Auditorium. At the same venue, Monday, November 17, Hope native and current Vice President for Technical Education and Workforce Development at North Arkansas College Ricky Tompkins spoke. Making his presentation Tuesday, the 18th, was Steve Rook, Chancellor of Arkansas State University Three Rivers. Each spoke at a podium for about half an hour, accompanied by slides projected on a screen behind them, then took questions from members of the audience.

The links in the paragraph above go to video of each candidate’s presentation, which can be viewed on UAHT’s YouTube channel.

The three presented on the theme of “Building Bridges, Strengthening UAHT's Role as a Regional Catalyst for Education and Opportunity.” Each began with assessments of the achievements attained by UAHT, the advantages it enjoys by way of geographic location and resources, and then proceeded to a set of recommendations for the college’s future that each would implement after taking office as permanent chancellor.

Laura Clark

Clark, who presented first, has more than 30 years’ service to UAHT in several positions, including Vice Chancellor for Academics currently, as well as, in the past, Dean of Health Professions, Practical Nursing Director and Arkansas Rural Nursing Education Consortium Program Chair.

Taking up an analogy to bridges and road networks, Clark said, “At the heart of any thriving community is a prosperity system. These are roadways and byways and bypasses, and they're all interconnected, and they work together to create opportunity and growth. And in the center of this are usually three major areas.” These, she said, are early education, workforce education and industry.

The surrounding sectors that are also important are economic development, nonprofits and infrastructure. For Clark, the role of UAHT is to use its own resources and its relationships with the important sectors she named to overcome barriers that keep the region from realizing its full potential for its citizens’ lives.

Next, Clark listed ways UAHT, with her involvement, has made efforts at bridge-building to overcome barriers. Among them was the expansion of the university to a Texarkana, Arkansas, location, which allowed for students living in that area to use their lottery scholarships to attend classes in their town. In Adult Education, Clark said, UAHT became a provider for students who lacked their high school diploma, allowing applicants for employment to list credentials obtained from attending UAHT classes.

Expansion of UAHT’s nursing program, Clark said, started when she first joined the institution. The total number of nursing graduates in that year was fewer than 30. “I knew that was a problem because we had a nursing shortage, and so I worked with administration. Administration worked with me, and as campus expanded, we were able to expand our location, expand the size of our classrooms, take on new students.” UAHT can now take on 50 LPN students every year. It also has a Bachelor of Science in Nursing program thanks to a relationship with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Other medical programs were added, too, including in the training of surgical technologists, for which hospitals expressed a need.

Clark also touted UAHT’s textbook rental program, which helps students with affording their educations, as well as involvement with establishing a way high school students can start accumulating college credits or job certifications early—also a way of lowering the costs of their educations. In response to a shortage of crucial transportation employees, UAHT has also joined the Arkansas Truck Driving Academy, allowing for training in handling the big diesels to be available in Southwest Arkansas. “We received grant funding through the [Arkansas] Office of Skills Development so that we can offer that for free,” Clark said.

As mining of the Smackover Deposit for lithium gets underway, Clark said the school is already preparing to be of service to this effort. “We know lithium is big in the news, but we are a part of a consortium as well, working on what is coming around the corner for lithium, what jobs are going to be available, because we have to be on the front end of that,” she said.

With the state and federal government offering more grants and financial aid for students pursuing job-skills certifications, Clark said UAHT will have the programs to appeal to these students. She also said UAHT should concentrate on meeting the skilled-worker needs of industries in surrounding counties, and this would require continued investment in updated equipment. “We have to make sure our students have been trained in the most modern technology. If I'm training my students on something that’s 10 years old, and now we have a new way of doing it, I'm not providing the right skill set for the businesses that may be coming.” Former students should also be able to return to campus for updates to their original training.

Clark also proposed that UAHT consider reaching out to or opening sites for teaching classes in Nevada and Lafayette counties, both suffering from higher-than-average unemployment and Lafayette County likely to see a need due to lithium mining. On the latter, for which companies are now planning their installations, Clark said, “They will need employees, but they have to build it first, and so they're going to need people from our communities to work, and we need to be ready for that, and then continue to partner with other colleges.”

In closing, Clark said there should be a concentration on “local victories,” explaining, “When we do a local victory here and a victory there and a victory over here, then pretty soon we have transformed our whole region that we live in every day and that we work in. Every credential that is earned and every high school partnership that is launched expands and creates momentum.”

Ricky Tompkins

Tompkins, like former UAHT Chancellor Chris Thomason, is a 1991 graduate of Hope High School. His experience includes current service at North Arkansas College as Vice President for Technical Education and Workforce Development, as Chief Academic Officer at Northwest Arkansas Community College, and as Director of the Institute for Corporate and Public Safety.

Upon coming to the podium, Tompkins acknowledged several members of the audience as people he had worked with, been a student with, or been a student of during his time living in Hope. Each off-campus candidate for chancellor has been welcomed with a tour of both campuses and meetings with the university’s administrative offices and departments. “I really have had a wonderful day,” Tompkins said, referring to these. “You should be very proud of your people here on campus. They have been so hospitable here and in Texarkana. It is just amazing the assets that you have in your community here.”

Tompkins then began his presentation by observing that UAHT has advantages other institutions of its kind do not. Its proximity to an interstate and its proximity to a railroad were among these. “I truly believe that UAHT could be a community or regional hub,” he said. “Absolutely. From a workforce development perspective, being able to provide a skilled workforce, to being able to provide opportunities for our students that they did not know were possible, to being able to provide an economic path for them to better their lives—not just for themselves, but for their families and generations to come. Is that not what we do in education?”

He also referred to the necessity of working with other entities—governments, schools and companies—and responding quickly to calls for skilled workers. “If we can partner with our K-12 partners, if we can partner with Hope, we can partner with Texarkana, if we can partner with Lewisville, Spring Hill. If we can partner with all businesses and industry, meeting their needs. And [for] most of those businesses, guess what? They can't wait two, three, four, five years to have their positions filled. They need them now. So what short-term opportunities can we provide for?”

Tompkins said that under his chancellorship, the university would be defining ways of measuring regional success and reviewing those measures to determine what can be improved. “We're going to be looking at metrics on graduation, on career placement. We're going to be looking at how we're doing, and we're going to share those with you in the community. Because, again … we are your community college, and we want you all to be proud of what we're doing.”

During his campus visit, Tompkins said he noticed UAHT had dealt with a problem high school students who drive to North Arkansas College for afternoon sessions still contend with: not being able to eat before entering class.

“Many of them drive 30, 45 minutes to get there and take the bus, so they're leaving their campus at noon. Guess what they did not do before they left their high school? They didn't eat. So as I was walking from building to building, and I see Hope students carrying these white containers of their lunch, I need you to know that investment from Hope High School and Hope School District is phenomenal. I am truly going to use that example when I get back up to North Arkansas and say, ‘They're doing this down in Hope. They're doing this in Texarkana,’ because you can't learn if you're hungry.”

There’s another group of potential students Tompkins referred to as being left behind with regard to education access in Arkansas—residents who are above the traditional college age. “Across the state, and with all 22 two-year colleges, you get above the age of 30, and there is a steep decline in our student population. We're losing them.” He proposed efforts to reach them, among them the offering of classes to “upskill”—to build onto skills that were marketable in earlier years those that make them better job candidates and employees now.

Those who have been left out of the current economy, Tompkins said, are also going to be attended to under his chancellorship. “We have some folks hurting right now. We have some folks hungry right now. We have some folks homeless right now,” he said.

Tompkins illustrated his thinking in response to this reality. “How are we serving them? How are we able to meet their needs? You have a food pantry on campus. What does that look like? How is it being used? We have some of our students right now who are coming to this campus who are living in their cars. I promise you, you do. Is there a safe place where they can park? Can they utilize Wi-Fi while they're in their car? I'm sure the students are taking online classes. What are we doing to serve and to meet those needs?”

The job of the chancellor, he said, is not to sit in his office and hope the information comes to him. “My role is to be out speaking with you, participating in community organizations, meeting with legislators, meeting with employers, meeting with our K-12 districts. How can we better serve you? How can we brainstorm? How can we work together? Because nothing that we have talked about, or will talk about, can happen with one person or one institution or one organization. It takes all of us, and requires relationships.”

Acknowledging he is generally a jovial guy, Tompkins said there is one problem that can cause him a mood change. “There are only a couple of times where the red’s going to start coming up my neck. If we continue to put up barriers for our students—and don't we love to do that? We’ve got to get those down.”

This anti-barrier approach will necessitate trying new things, and sometimes failing, but realizing failures, then moving on to the next proposal, because “we have got to continue to innovate.” He cited an energy-savings initiative that began at NWACC with a maintenance staffer applying for a grant for the cost of low-wattage bulbs and other upgrades and ended up saving the college $80,000 a year that can then be used in ways to more directly benefit students.

For innovative solutions to barriers, Tompkins said there will have to be efforts to find grants and revenue from sources not tapped before, especially after the upcoming fiscal session of the Arkansas legislature, where he said the likelihood of new money coming is not great. But when new funding comes, new programs work and news of an individual student’s success arrives, Tompkins said he wants to create a work culture that celebrates and publicizes those things.

He spoke of his time in the Arkansas Community Colleges Center for Student Success, working to improve student experiences at the 22 colleges who were members, including UAHT. He was involved in changing the burden on students with academic deficits so that they no longer had to take many developmental courses prior to being allowed to take college courses. Instead, they take co-requisite courses alongside their college ones and get assistance from student success centers on campuses to help them catch up.

As chancellor, Tompkins said he wants to work on knocking down another barrier that keeps students from enrolling and from attending classes—lack of transportation. He noted that a college in Kentucky had made arrangements with local public schools’ busing system to transport college students as long as the stops were on already existing routes.

As an illustration of the importance of relationship-building in his career, Tompkins showed a photo of the book cover of Crisis Management Strategies (2012), which he co-authored with Melodie A. Marcks.

Steve Rook

Rook, Chancellor of Arkansas State University Three Rivers, hails from southeast Arkansas and was the first college graduate from his family. In his career in higher education leadership, he has served at Cameron University, the University of Arkansas at Little Rock, and the University of Arkansas Rich Mountain before becoming ASU-Three Rivers Chancellor.

In his presentation time, Rook first introduced his wife, Connie, who was present, and said he had visited UAHT several times, including attending concerts at Hempstead Hall and meetings of the Southwest Arkansas Community College Consortium.

Rook began his presentation proper with an exploration of the definitions of bridge and catalyst. “The word bridge has 265 synonyms if you search it on the internet, and some of those are overpass, platforms, span, scaffold. But, you know, bridge is also a part of the guitar … What I want to talk about is connection. And I apologize because a lot of you have heard me use that word a lot today, but I believe that's what my role would be, and that's what we need to do to strengthen not only UAHT.”

A catalyst, he said, “speeds up or triggers significant change, progress or action without being consumed in the process. And that really struck me, because in higher ed, we do that a lot. We get involved with things, and sometimes we get consumed with them.” In the context of leadership, Rook said, “catalyst means sparks momentum, removes barriers, enables others to succeed, and creates conditions where positive change can happen.” Rook added that these are also traits of the servant leader, a role he has tried to play over his career and intends to continue.

By way of autobiography, Rook said he is a first-generation college student, his maternal grandfather having fought in World War II. He defined himself as a servant leader who strives to position all staff at his colleges in the best contexts in which to serve students. He described his career track from Cameron University to UALR and then to UA-Rich Mountain and then “nine and a half years as a CEO at a two-year campus [ASU-Three Rivers] heavily involved in the community. I think everybody's heard me say that I'm on our economic development commission for Hot Spring County, on the executive board for the Chamber of Commerce. [I] just love being involved in things, involved with the Chamber of Commerce in Saline County and Benton and Bryant.”

Rook said that as a way of increasing retention of students once they are enrolled, he wanted to impart to them a sense of belonging. He also said he appreciated that UAHT has 60 programs that range from nursing to industrial maintenance. “Versatility [is] one of the things that community colleges can do when business and industry request programs. We can move more quickly than four-year institutions in providing that. That's something we need to cherish, and we need to keep doing. Quality and community—I think those are excellent core values.”

Next, Rook mentioned challenges facing higher education, including population and enrollment drop-offs and a trend toward less funding from government entities, while AI also looms as a phenomenon colleges must respond to.

“AI is here to stay, and we can either get involved with it, we can teach it, we can push it, or we can get swallowed by it,” Rook said. “It reminds me of when the internet—and I'm old enough to remember this—when the internet became something that everybody was threatened by. We can't be threatened by it. We've got to learn how to use it, learn how to incorporate it on campus, learn how to incorporate it in our services … by focusing on agility, collaboration, relevance. We can turn disruption into progress for our students and our communities.”

He named several programs ASU-Three Rivers has that UAHT also has, including nursing and medical workers, commenting that as much as there have been increases in the number of graduates, the demand in these fields continues to rise. Rook mentioned that demand is emerging in a couple of fields few know about. “Nobody knows what Mechatronics is. Nobody knows what advanced manufacturing is,” but Arkansas schools should respond to needs for those skills. Like Tompkins, Rook also favors programs that can help update what past graduates know to meet current skills needs.

He said he also wants UAHT to be nimble enough to quickly set up training programs needed by employers, explaining that during his chancellorship at ASU-Three Rivers he took tours of area plants, asking those running them what their needs were for skilled workers. “If anybody ever asked, ‘Can you do this for us?’ if we didn't have it, we didn't say no. We just said, ‘Not yet.’ And then we started working with them on what they needed, what their priorities were, to make sure that we met the needs that they were trying to fix.”

Rook described his preference for the all-important budgeting process as open and inclusive. “Budgets start at staff level. We send out sheets that people fill out. [They can] see what they had requested last year, and they put together what they want for next year. We bring those together, they justify anything more [that they request]. But we bring all that together … When we finally come to a balanced budget, we bring all those groups back together and say, well, here's how we did it. If we have to take something out of somebody's budget, we meet with them first.”

He also mentioned a recent success in seeking grant funding, cutting ribbon for a new building to be used for ASU-Three Rivers’ nursing programs. Federal funding that Senator John Boozman helped bring to Malvern was instrumental in this happening, Rook said. “I got a phone call from our university relations guy, Shane Broadway. He said, ‘You got anything you need funded?’ ‘Yeah, I do. I got a nursing building I need to pay for.’ [We] did the paperwork, sent it in. Senator Boozman’s team took the ball and ran with it, and last Wednesday, we cut the ribbon on an $8 million nursing facility.” Grant funding ASU-Three Rivers requested has also arrived for the $5 million renovation of a downtown theater, Rook said.

Rook summarized his goals for UAHT: “I hope we can increase enrollment and retention … be an active member of the Southwest Arkansas Workforce Development Board, grow our foundation resources, strengthen community engagement and maximize the resources from the UA system.”

As mentioned, each candidate engaged in a question-and-answer session after their presentations. These can be seen on the videos of their respective appearances.

Above photo: Ricky Tompkins gestures toward the visual display during his presentation Monday.