ORLANDO, Fla.—Sandy Shugart has big ideas. Six of them, to be exact. And you don’t have to go very far on any of the five campuses of Valencia College in central Florida to hear what they are. The community-college president’s vision has seeped into the bloodstream of the Orlando education community—deans, faculty, tutors, neighboring colleges, and even employers.
It may seem odd to hear the same phrases pop up in conversations with various school administrators—“the ecosystem of higher education,” for example, or “anyone can learn anything under the right conditions”—until you meet Shugart. He has planted and cultivated those seeds in everyone around him.
“What I’m after there is not compliance. What I’m after there is fertility, fecundity,” he said. “So a guy who’s mowing the lawn can say, ‘You know what? It’s really not very learning-centered for me to mow right up next to the classrooms when people are trying to learn. I need to mow away from the buildings during prime time.’ ”
If Shugart sounds like a daytime talk-show host, it’s no accident. He compares himself to Phil Donahue. “I have the same hair.” A more apt comparison is to former President Clinton; both leaders have an uncanny ability to make platitudinous statements sound genuine. Both relate easily to people. And, yes, both have great hair.
“From the very first year Sandy was here, he asked two questions: ‘Are students learning? How do we know?’ ” said Nasser Hedayat, a former electrical-engineering professor who heads the college’s outreach to Orlando employers.
The answers to Shugart’s questions are the reason that Valencia was the first school to win the top prize in the Aspen Institute’s College Excellence Program. The contest, which offers $1 million a year for community colleges, was unveiled two years ago by President Obama when he launched a campaign to increase community-college graduations by a total of 5 million by 2020.
One year later, Aspen awarded Valencia $600,000 and gave four runner-up institutions $100,000 each. Valencia devoted more than half of its award, $350,000, to its unique faculty-training facility; the rest went to student scholarships. School fundraisers say that a matching campaign will at least double the amount of the Aspen award. The recognition that goes with the prize also upped Shugart’s national profile. A few minutes before his interview with National Journal, he finished a conference call with White House officials and three university presidents who sat on a panel that took place Monday.
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