Catching Up With LBCC President Hamann

Greg Hamann began serving as the seventh president of Linn Benton Community College in February 2010 and has recently been elected Chair-elect of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC).

Hamann is grateful for the opportunity to serve and feels this is also a great opportunity to “draw national attention to some of the great, innovative things that people at LBCC are doing.”

The AACC is the leading proponent and the national “voice for community colleges,” supporting and promoting its member colleges through “policy initiatives, innovative programs, research and information and strategic outreach to business and industry and the national news media.”

We got a chance to catch up with Hamann and find out more about his new role and how it might affect Linn Benton students in the future.

WHO IS THE AACC?

The AACC is the National Association of about 1600 community colleges in the country. This is our professional association with about 1300 of them being members of the AACC. Then there is a specific group within the AACC, which is the collective membership of the presidents themselves of the institutions. They work together to develop professional development opportunities and talk about where we need to be moving strategically. 

So it’s a place in which we’re able to collectively think about the role of community colleges and then to develop programming that helps us as a group to think in specific directions and move in specific ways.

WHAT IS THE FOCUS OF AACC AT THIS TIME?

At the national level, the discussions are around two things. The presidents aren’t leading this discussion but we’re trying to get our head around it to understand what it means for us. The prominent national discussion is how to get more people who try college to be successful at college because the vast majority isn’t.

If you look at this community, in our district alone, if you take the population 25 years and older, (according to the 2010 census), 26% of the population has done some college and never completed a degree. So what does that do to our capacity to support innovative, growing businesses that would produce employment and economic vitality for this community? It limits us. We need to fix that. 

That’s our local picture, but it’s a part of a national picture and that is: we need to help students complete. We need to help them to achieve the educational outcomes that they said they came here for. Way too many of them get sidetracked, give up, meet what they obviously feel are insurmountable obstacles, and most often I think they just feel sort of lost or alone in that. So we need to think about how to come along side students and lead them… to make it possible for them.

WHAT OBSTACLES ARE STUDENTS FACING?

Frequently, we’re the problem. The way in which we deliver education makes it structurally difficult for them. Maybe they need to be doing their coursework in the evening. Maybe they need to be doing it all online. Maybe they need to be doing it on weekends. Why do you need to quit your job to go to school? Or maybe you’re trying to balance a family life with a partner who works so you have to be home with your kids. So how do we make that work? Our educational model is designed around 19 year-old's that have nothing else to do. 

The other thing that is being discussed at the national level is the business model for higher education. How does it work financially? It appears the cost of education keeps going up. It goes up faster than the inflation index. There are a lot of great explanations for that but that doesn’t solve the challenge that students face in terms of availing themselves to the opportunities that a higher education might provide them. So we’re going to need to fix that. If we don’t fix it, somebody will fix it for us. Education is going to cost less in the future. So we need to ask ourselves, how do we do that?

There’s a whole movement around what we call open-source educational resources, which means that the textbooks, the course design, and the assessment of a huge number of contact areas that we teach could be available to anyone and everyone… for free. 

It’s already true in a lot of areas. You can go online and you can take MIT’s basic biology class right now, for free. You can’t put that together and form a degree, but those resources are out there now. So what does that mean for us? What is our role?

What we’re doing, both nationally and also here at the college, is thinking about and actually starting to plan what that is going to look like and how we’re going to have to be different. I think we’ve done some pretty good work in thinking about what that may be. Probably some of it’s a bit controversial too.

A NEW COURSE CALLED “DESTINATION GRADUATION” WILL BE OFFERED BEGINNING FALL TERM. IS THIS A REQUIRED COURSE DESIGNED TO GUIDE STUDENTS TO COMPLETION?

This is a class for all new students who are degree seeking. What we have learned is that what a student does and decides within a really short period of time after starting college tells you a whole lot about whether or not they will actually succeed. 

So if we can connect with students in ways that encourage and force them to actually develop an academic plan, it’s incredible how much of a higher probability there is that they will actually achieve an educational outcome. So we’re going do that. And that’s really what Destination Graduation is about. 

It’s about saying you come to us, you say that you’re degree seeking; that means you want to graduate. We’re going to talk about a plan to get there. We’re not just going to say, “Oh yeah, it’s going to be great to graduate.” We’re going to sit down and we’re going to make that plan so you know what step 1, step 2, and step 3 is.

WHAT IS YOUR VISION FOR LBCC?

I think it is best captured in what we are discussing as our new mission statement. “To engage in an education that enables all of us to participate in, contribute to, and benefit from the cultural richness and economic vitalities of our communities.” I would say that’s my vision for us. 

There are some key components there that distinguish us from other institutions. One, we care about how our education impacts this community. We’re not a private institution that is located somewhere and cares about how they impact New York. We care about impacting Linn and Benton counties. This is OUR community. 

Another thing it says is that your benefit and your community’s benefit are inextricably tied to each other. At some point, I would love every student to be able to say not only what they’re going to do with their life, but how their life is going to make their community better. 

The third thing that it says is that for this to work, it has to be for everyone. It can’t be just for those that can afford it or those that have the right background, because anyone who can’t contribute to this community extracts something from it. I think everyone has the potential to contribute. We just need to feed that potential. 

This is a conversation that’s starting to happen everywhere and I hope we turn this into reality. I don’t want to live in a world where 10 percent of the population has something and the rest of us are all trying to have it. I think public education, especially community college education, is the best chance we have for all of us to succeed and thrive.

ARE THERE ANY NEW COURSES/PROGRAMS YOU FORSEE FOR FUTURE LBCC STUDENTS?

I do think, in general terms, there’s certainly areas in which we look to grow and expand. There will be an ever increasing need for people to work in a variety of health occupations and areas. Nursing is the one we sort of fixate on but there’s dozens of other ones and some that we don’t even know the names of yet. With coordinated care, under health care reform, there are going to be a whole plethora of people who are specialists in coordinating care. Nobody has a training program for that person yet. My guess is we’re going to have one someday, someday real soon. 

I also think that we’re going to see a need for people to work, not just sort of ideally but very practically, in the area of alternative fuels and alternative energies. So I anticipate in the very near future that we’ll see a significant transformation of programs, like our automotive technology program and our mechatronics program, that will move us into thinking a whole lot more broadly than diesel and gasoline. I think that that’s an exciting proposition. I would love to be a leader in supporting that economic cluster in this area. 

There are some programs that are growing at this institution that would appear to have nothing to do with jobs. Our theater program, our music program, some of our language programs, poetry, writing… 

One of the things that are in our mission statement, as proposed, is that it isn’t just about economic vitality; it’s about cultural richness. Our quality of life is not determined solely by our paycheck, and we want to make sure that that is tangibly represented in the work that we do. 

So I think that what you’ll find is that we’ll be more explicit in why we do those things… why we do theater, why we do choral, why we do baseball; you know, the things in life that remind us that life is supposed to be fun. And maybe that’s why they were first invented but sometimes we forget why.

I think we’re going to see ourselves being way more intentional in talking about why we do these things and why they matter. I think that will help students too. It will help all of us, not just students, to be more intentional about how we choose to participate. 

If we really think theater enriches our lives, maybe students will go to the theater. Or journalism… maybe we’ll read the paper, maybe we’ll try our hand at writing. 

So much of our problems as a culture right now are related to our inability to constructively communicate with each other. Our music and writing is all about communicating, and we need to rediscover that.

WHAT ACCOMPLISHMENTS ARE YOU MOST PROUD OF ACHIEVING SINCE YOU STARTED HERE IN 2010?

I don’t think much in terms of personal accomplishments. It’s been an interesting time with such significant challenges.

I think I’m proud of having helped us to be in a pretty positive place, in pretty challenging times. And that is the collective capacity of all the people who are a part of this, not just me.

Our physical environment has changed so drastically since I came here. I’m proud that we’ve gone through some really challenging times pretty unified.

I don’t think we, as a community, feel defeated. I think we feel like there’s hope. I think we have a stronger sense that we have the capacity to design our future, which is really the definition of hope.