Valencia College President Sandy Shugart – He's a poet, a picker and a prophet

Sink or swim

A few years later, Shugart moved back to Chapel Hill to earn a master’s degree in teaching, dividing his interests between cognitive theory about how people learn and the science of human behavior. During a seminar in his final year, he met an aide in the office of North Carolina Gov. Jim Hunt who offered him a job as a research associate and policy adviser — essentially lower level work that included staffing task forces and writing speeches. A year and a half later, as Hunt was leaving office due to term limits, a former North Carolina governor who was running the state’s community college system gave Shugart a job as the system’s chief academic officer.

It was a job for which, on paper at least, Shugart was completely unqualified. Just 25, he had been on a community college campus exactly once in his life — when he took the GED test after returning from England. His new job placed him in charge of a professional staff of 80 and gave him responsibility for all of the community college system’s academic, technical and vocational programs.

“I’m sure everybody thought I would crash and burn, and I probably should have,” Shugart says. “But you know sometimes ignorance is a friend. I thought, ‘Well, I can’t lead on the basis of technical expertise, so the only way to do this was on the basis of principle. So I’m just going to focus on what’s the right thing to do in every decision on principle.’ And it turned out that people were hungry for principle-centered leadership, especially in this highly bureaucratic and politicized environment.”

That meant awarding program grants based entirely on merit rather than which legislative district they were in and, somewhat ironically, refusing to hire people just because some powerful politician asked him to. He spent eight years in the post, despite, Shugart says, getting “beat up a couple of times” by politicians unhappy with his choices. But as the years progressed, Shugart says he found himself spending more time representing the system in the North Carolina Legislature and less time trying to understand how people learn. He decided that he needed to be closer to students, running a campus of his own.

Student focused

Within just a few weeks, he found a job as president of North Harris College in Houston. The school had begun as a suburban college serving primarily privileged white students. But it had since been surrounded by urban growth, and it no longer looked at all like the community it was supposed to serve. It had become a white island in a sea of color.

Shugart had the school build extensions in tough neighborhoods and revamped the college’s induction process to better help students who came from poorer schools. North Harris opened a center in Acres Homes, one of the oldest African-American neighborhoods in the South. In eight years, the percentage of minority students in the school’s student body grew from 17% to 53%.

But while North Harris succeeded at providing access to a more diverse array of students, it was not nearly as successful at helping those students succeed once they arrived. Graduation rates remained disappointingly low, and there were wide gulfs in performance based on demographics. Shugart says that many in leadership at the school weren’t prepared to make the kind of dramatic change it would have taken to address those problems.

“So I woke up one night in the middle of the night and woke Jane up,” Shugart says. “And she said, ‘What’s going on?’ And I said, ‘It’s time to move.’ And she said, ‘Why?’ I said, ‘Because I’m swimming in the shallow end of the pool. I belong in the deep end with sharks.’

“She said, ‘Well, that’s the truth,’ and rolled over and went to sleep.”

At the time, Valencia, best known then for edgy and interesting marketing, was searching for a new president. The school didn’t recruit Shugart — he called and asked for the application packet. Part of the application involved writing an essay outlining his attitude toward the “learning college movement” — an emerging philosophy of how community colleges should function that Shugart had studied.

He applied and got the job — barely. The school’s board of trustees deadlocked 4-4, debating between Shugart and another candidate for several hours, before the chairman of the board agreed to flip her vote and break the logjam. Shugart accepted the job without negotiating a salary.

No limits

What Shugart brought to Orlando was, more than anything, a different way of thinking — both the anyone-canlearn philosophy and an inclination to challenge deeply entrenched beliefs.

Take, for instance, the obsession most community colleges have on preserving and growing enrollment — usually the biggest determinant of their funding.

“Colleges were created in the late ’50s and into the ’60s to handle massive influxes of enrollment — the Baby Boom,” Shugart says. “At the time, the dominant model of organizational life in America for that kind of work was the factory. It was the peak of productivity of American industry. So they adopted that model. It’s an assembly line — you go from professor to professor to professor, and there’s not really a whole lot of connection between what they do. You come in as a student; you’re kind of a raw material. If you graduate, you’re a product. They talk in those terms even. And the real value of a factory isn’t 100% success with raw material — it’s productivity.”

Shugart believes that colleges do a lot of things to maintain enrollment that undermine learning — things like allowing students to drop out of a class after a week and add a different one in its place. That keeps as many people enrolled as possible, but it leads to a wasted first week of instruction because there’s no telling who will be in the class come the second week.

Under Shugart, Valencia has eliminated students’ ability to add classes after the first day of school, willingly sacrificing enrollment to ensure that professors can begin teaching from day one.

Tags: Education