March 29, 2024

Higher Ed

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

Jason Garcia | 5/29/2018

The bond between Valencia and UCF keeps expanding. The two schools are now organizing meetings between faculties to better align their curriculums, down to the level of individual courses. They are gathering and sharing more student data. And they are partnering on a new joint campus in downtown Orlando.

“We would never do this with someone we didn’t trust and know as deeply as Valencia, as personified by Sandy Shugart,” says Dale Whittaker, recently chosen to succeed Hitt as UCF president.

Shugart has an even warmer relationship with Whittaker than he did with Hitt. Whittaker is a fellow musician who sometimes plays harmonica in Shugart’s band.

Looking ahead

A few weeks from now, around the beginning of July, Shugart will disappear for a month. He’ll escape to the side of Mount Rogers, the highest peak in Virginia, where he owns a cabin and 10 acres of fruit orchards, berry bushes and trees near the Appalachian Trail.

He’ll spend the month reading and writing, listening to music, watching old movies, hiking and chopping firewood.

And he’ll consider whether the time has come for him to move on from Valencia.

“After eight to 10 years, somewhere in that range, you need to start regularly pulling back and saying, ‘Do they still really need me or am I just using them?’ ” Shugart says. “Every two years, I go away for a while and try to discern: If I’m to stay, what’s my contribution? Is that worth staying for? Or do they really need somebody who comes at this whole work differently?”

And yet, one morning earlier this spring, Shugart was alone in his office, scrawling out a series of back-of-thenapkin calculations on one of two large whiteboards that line one of his walls. He had just read a newspaper story that said metro Orlando is expected to add nearly 1.4 million residents by 2030. That got him thinking.

There are something like 107 students enrolled in area colleges or universities right now in Central Florida for every 1,000 residents. Even assuming the college- going rate doesn’t rise, that could mean somewhere on the order 150,000 more college and university students. And it’s safe bet that most of those new students — many of whom will be adults — will wind up at Valencia and the region’s other state colleges. By Shugart’s rough estimates, absorbing that growth could require some $600 million to add and expand facilities. That’s longterm spending, he says, that local, state and college leaders need to be thinking about now.

“The only folks who are thinking this way are in transportation infrastructure,” Shugart says. “I need to get people thinking about education infrastructure.”

Told that this did not seem like the thinking of a man who is about to go live on a mountain for a month and decide he’s no longer needed, Shugart barked out a laugh.

“Well, good,” he says. “When I can’t put anything on the whiteboard, that’s when it’s time to go.”

See other stories from Florida Trend's June issue.

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