Valencia College’s Sandy Shugart thinks differently about how people learn and how colleges ought to operate. In his world, student performance takes priority over enrollment growth — and science and art are two sides of the same coin.

Years ago, when he was the president of a community college in Texas, Sandy Shugart gave a speech to the state teachers union in which he argued that any student can learn anything under the right conditions. Afterward, a teacher came up to him to say that, while she agreed with him in most cases, there were certain subjects — a complicated foreign language like German, for instance — that were simply beyond the innate abilities of some people. She was, as it happened, a German teacher.

Well, that’s fascinating, Shugart replied. Because in Germany, he said, just about everybody can learn to speak German.

“That’s not genetic,” says Shugart, who is now the president of Valencia College in Orlando. “There’s not a Deutsche gene. It just happens that the conditions for learning German are exceptional in Germany. And I could take nearly anyone from any other country, drop them in Kitzbuhel with 100 euros and say I’ll be back in three months, and they’ll be speaking German when I pick them up.”

That philosophy — anyone can learn anything, under the right conditions — has been the polestar of Shugart’s 18-year tenure as president of Valencia, which, under his watch, has become one of the largest and most successful community colleges in the nation.

There might be no better example of that creed than Shugart himself. In addition to running a college with 45,000 full-time students, Shugart is also a singer and songwriter with three independently published records and a folk-rock band — Sandy Shugart & the January Band — that recently played at the $400-million Dr. Phillips Center in downtown Orlando. He writes poetry and has published a book called “Leadership in the Crucible of Work.” He has run marathons and been a scratch golfer. He has a favorite guitar maker — and a favorite sociologist.

To an outsider, they seem like a disparate assortment of hobbies. But to Shugart, who has spent a lifetime studying how people learn, they are all inextricably linked.

“I suppose I enjoy the variety,” says Shugart. “I like immensely when things are supposed to be out of different cultures and you discover that they’re really not. I could not possibly do management without music, or science without art, or human relationships without philosophy. I don’t want a garden unless I can think about cosmology. These things go together somehow.”

Shugart’s approach to educating has produced impressive results at Valencia. The school’s graduates have a roughly 95% job placement rate and account for one in every four graduates from the University of Central Florida. More than twothirds of Valencia students are minorities.

Seven years ago, the school won the first Aspen Prize, the honor most highly prized by community colleges throughout the nation. Four years later, Washington Monthly named Shugart one of the 10 most innovative college and university presidents in the country. Last year, he won the prestigious McGraw Prize for innovation in education.

“Sandy is the best president in America. Period,” says Jackson Sasser, president of Santa Fe College in Gainesville, who has known Shugart since the 1990s when the two of them ran community colleges in Houston. “And I include universities and private colleges in that.”

Intellectual fires

Sanford Curtis Shugart, 61, was born in North Carolina, the second of four children. His father, an English lit major who served in the U.S. Army Air Forces, was part of the group that flew the first daylight bombings against the Nazis in World War II. The division was immortalized in the Gregory Peck movie Twelve O’Clock High.

After the war, the elder Shugart moved his young family around often — California, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, North Carolina, England — because of what Shugart cryptically refers to as his dad’s “business interests.” Pressed for details, he says his father was “in the chemical business, on the sales side of it.” But that’s it. “It’s work that I wasn’t even supposed to know about,” he says. “He served his country in a number of ways, but always off the grid.”

His mother, a former concert pianist who played until she was nearly 80, was a music teacher who encouraged her children to play music. All three of his siblings went to Juilliard. His older brother plays the cello, and one younger sister is a violist; his other sister used to be a violinist but now is a venture capitalist with an apartment on Park Avenue in Manhattan. “We grew up in a musical family, a traveled family, a reading family — a European family is the way it felt to me,” Shugart says. Both parents live in a Winter Garden nursing home, where Shugart is a regular visitor.

When he was 16, his father’s “business interests” took the family to England. Shugart was enrolled in the Millfield School, a boarding academy in Somerset, where, he says, “I had my intellectual fires lit.” Shugart sees his life story as a series of big questions that he set out to answer. “The one that interested me the most was: What makes truth true? How do you know a thing is true or not? That’s why I went to college.” He enrolled in the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chose chemistry as his major, with plans to study the philosophy of science in graduate school.

He got derailed. He had a religious conversion in college, describing himself as Anglican, and met his future wife, Jane, singing church hymns. (They have four children, the youngest of whom starts his freshman year at Florida State this fall.) Her father wouldn’t let them marry until Shugart started working, so instead of studying philosophy in graduate school, he took a job teaching high school chemistry in suburban Atlanta.

“I discovered a new question,” he says. “Since I wasn’t able to pursue ‘how do you know anything?’ I got really interested in how the brain works and how people learn. Why do some smart students succeed; why do some smart students not succeed?”

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.

Shugart is also a data evangelist. After he arrived, he had the school begin examining years of student transcripts, which revealed that the success students had in their first five courses had a huge impact on how they fared through the rest of their college career. A student who withdrew, failed or earned a D in one of those first five classes saw his or her chances of graduation decline by almost 50%. So Valencia implemented strict application deadlines — once again sacrificing enrollment in exchange for ensuring that all students had enough time to be assessed, advised and oriented and that they showed up ready to learn on the first day of class.

One of the metrics Shugart pays the most attention to is the “college-going rate” — the share of students in any given area that pursue higher education. A few years ago, school leaders discovered that there was a pocket of Osceola County where the college-going rate was only about 35%, which was well below the countywide average of about 48%. Valencia built a campus in the area. College-going rates are now almost 50%.

“They do a great job of looking at data to drive their analyses and to evaluate their impact,” says Josh Wyner, executive director of the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program. “A lot of colleges will review their programs every three to five years. Valencia will review them every year. And in their meetings, they’re looking at data, good and bad — they’re looking at completion rates, they’re looking at job placement rates, wage rates.”

After years of navigating the North Carolina Legislature, Shugart has also proven a shrewd student of Florida politics who has managed to avoid controversy while keeping the college’s many stakeholders happy. When there has been conflict, Shugart has always won.

In 2013, Shugart clashed with a Valencia trustee — a local political fundraiser appointed to the board first by former Gov. Charlie Crist and again by Gov. Rick Scott — who criticized Shugart’s management of the school. The Florida Senate, led at the time by an Orlando Republican and Shugart ally, responded by refusing to confirm the trustee’s appointment, forcing her off the board.

The next year, Shugart and Valencia’s trustees angered Scott by raising tuition to avoid a budget deficit. Shugart says Scott’s staff responded with subtle threats of budget vetoes and trustee reprisals. But the governor’s office never followed through and Scott, who is now running for U.S. Senate, has continued to use Valencia as a backdrop for public events.

“Sandy is brilliant,” says Ann McGee, longtime president of neighboring Seminole State College.

DirectConnect

Ask just about anyone in Orlando about Shugart’s most important legacy at Valencia and one subject always comes up: Valencia’s “DirectConnect” partnership with the University of Central Florida, which guarantees admission to UCF to any student who earns an associate’s degree from Valencia.

Shugart had been studying performance figures at UCF, which showed that Valencia transfers who had finished their associate’s degree were far more likely to earn their bachelor’s at UCF than students who took courses at Valencia but transferred to UCF without first obtaining a degree. So he made an offer to UCF President John Hitt: If UCF was willing to guarantee admission to any Valencia graduate — no matter how rigorous the university’s admissions screening became — Valencia would agree not to pursue any bachelor’s degree programs of its own without UCF’s express blessing.

Hitt agreed to the deal. “If he tells you something, you can believe him,” says Hitt, who is retiring this summer after 26 years as UCF’s president. “And I value that enormously in anyone I work with. I need to know that I can count on the facts as they present them.”

The results have been profound. In the four years following the adoption of DirectConnect, Valencia’s enrollment grew about 17% — but the number of associate in arts degrees the college awarded soared 98%. UCF, meanwhile, has been able to become more selective with its freshman classes, helping the university climb in prestige and performance rankings while still preserving access to a much wider swath of students. And the two schools have avoided the bickering over bachelor’s degrees that has strained relationships between colleges and universities in other parts of the state. Other area colleges have also signed on to the program, including Seminole State, Lake-Sumter, Eastern Florida State, Daytona State and, most recently, Central Florida in Marion County.

“Prior to DirectConnect, you didn’t know what was going to happen to you down the line. There was another series of traumas, another series of applications,” says Lew Oliver, a longtime Valencia trustee. “Now there was light at the end of the tunnel for anyone who walked in the door at Valencia.”

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.”

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