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Kala Stroup
Former Mo. Higher Education Commissioner, university president
Retired since November, Kala Stroup reflects on a career of distinguished service to higher education. She settles on one word for those who will be following the road she’s traveled: Collaborate. “The one thing I learned as commissioner of higher education is that collaboration and cooperation among universities is very, very, very difficult, and all must learn to do it better,” she says. “And collaborating with other parts of the state or region that need you so much is just as important.” Such teamwork, she says, will be needed more as the state’s share of higher education funding pushes more of the costs of college onto students. Stroup’s views of higher education were shaped not only by her service in the administration of Gov. Mel Carnahan, but as president of two public universities—Southeast Missouri State and Murray State in Kentucky—as well as at the helm of non-profit training ground American Humanics in Kansas City. She also served five years in administration at Emporia State University, and 18 years teaching or as an administrator at the University of Kansas. Her recent retirement will give her time to sort through contact information on thousands of students she’s known through the decades. “I was drawn to the mission of higher education because I believed in the difference it made in people’s lives,” Stroup said. “That’s what attracted me in the first place and kept me there. I loved every day I worked in higher education.”
Jerry Farley
President, Washburn University
“Universities,” says Jerry Farley, “have been around since the 12th century. They are the most enduring of organizations, other than religious institutions, that I can think of.” The connection to a line of educators 900 years long helped draw him into higher education, and in 1997 to Topeka’s Washburn University. As a career financial officer in Oklahoma’s university system, he came to this role on a non-traditional path; many university presidents advance from teaching ranks to dean to administrative level to the top office. After earning an MBA, Farley went to work with an accounting firm that assigned him to a client university. A setting like that can have its perks when you’re 22 years old. “But after a while,” he says, “I became convinced that universities were doing something that was worth doing: They were really changing the future. “To be a part of something like that is what most people want to be, something much bigger, much broader and more important than they are as individuals.” Under Farley’s watch, Washburn University’s student body has flipped from two thirds non-traditional to two-thirds traditional. That has required a wholesale transformation to help the campus attract and retain students through graduation. And seeing them to that end is one of the draws for Farley. “On my last day at OU, I walked across the campus and I didn’t see a single soul that I knew,” he says. “Here, I walk across the campus and I know most of the students I encounter. That is a dramatic difference.”
Jahnae Barnett
President, William Woods University
Jahnae Barnett has a saying familiar to many a student at William Woods University: “These should not be the ‘best years of your life’—if we do our job well, the rest of your life will be the best ‘rest of your life.’” In nearly 20 years as president of WWU, she has helped remake a 300-student rural women’s college into a 3,000-student coeducational university, extending its physical reach by adding branches in Columbia, Jefferson City and Blue Springs. But she has also extended the college experience to students, engaging more of them in campus life through the innovative Leading, Educating, Achieving and Developing Program. Under it, students sign a contract to attend numerous cultural events, earning tuition discounts. A product of rural Missouri and Mississippi, Barnett says she was always aware that not everyone had the educational opportunities she had at universities in Arkansas, Mississippi and, closer to this region, MU. Thus, “access to education became a priority to me, and I was determined to find a way to deliver educational opportunities to working adults,” she said. “My inspiration was validated the first time our graduating
class consisted of working adults. … I knew that they had attained a life’s goal, and that William Woods University140had been instrumental in helping them to do so.” The one constant through her advance from business professor, department chair and vice-president to president, she says, has always been the student: “Young people and working adults generate energy. I have had the privilege to meet, teach, and learn from them.”
Jack Magruder
President, A.T. Still University
Coincidence—or maybe it was fate—had a lot to do with Jack Magruder’s short-notice acceptance of the presidency at A.T. Still University, the college of osteopathic medicine in Kirksville, Mo. He came into the position four years after he’d retired at 68 as president of crosstown Truman State University, an institution that had accounted for 39 years of his life after he had earned his degree there. But more than fate or coincidence, it was demonstrated competence: Magruder was on the ATSU board when the presidency came open in 2008, and his colleagues immediately turned to him. He, in turn, invoked a higher authority—his wife, Sue. “I said I had to talk to her first, and they said: ‘Here’s a cell phone. Do it now.’ ” He did, she said go for it, and the rest is A.T. Still history—through his contract expiration date of June 30, 2012, anyway. “I do plan to actually retire someday,” he cracks. The draw for him over his career has been the product: Young adults growing into difference-makers. “It may be idealistic, but the honest-to-goodness truth is, I’ve loved seeing the achievements of my students and colleagues,” Magruder said. “They’ve gone on to be a Speaker of House in Missouri, senators, representatives, bankers, presidents of businesses and members of significant boards, and a whole bunch of doctors, priests and pastors. All of them have been students, and all of them have helped me in some way. When I think about the good they do for society, I’m enormously pleased.”
Dean Mills
Dean, University of Missouri School of Journalism
Few business sectors are seeing the wrenching change confronting the young journalists Dean Mills helps send into the so-called “real world.” The Internet has given anyone with a keyboard—and an opinion—an electronic printing press. So Mills and his staff are moving quickly to stay ahead of the game. “We’re lucky at MU in the sense that, for more than 100 years, our faculty have practiced journalism in real-world media as well as taught,” says Mills. Luckier still for the school, he says, has been the addition of the Reynolds Journalism Institute, where faculty, students, staff and visiting professionals, are “inventing the future of journalism right here in Columbia.” But Mills, not luck, played a key role in securing the $31 million gift—the largest in MU history—that set up the institute. Bringing the institute to MU was a testament to his vision, colleagues say. “What he brings most to his role is his ability to think bigger to all of us around him,” said Pam Johnson, the RJI’s executive director. “He helps us elevate our work.” A former Moscow bureau chief for the Baltimore Sun, Mills joined MU in 1989, and has been honored with the university’s Manuel Pacheco Academic Leadership Award and the J-school’s Honor Award. But his greatest reward, he says, has been “seeing some of the world’s greatest students and faculty make journalism better with their great talent, ideas and energy.” And he remains committed to keeping future students ahead of the technology curve “to produce the journalism democracy depends on.”
Jan Roskam
Prof. Emeritus of Aerospace Engineering, University of Kansas
Over the course of 36 years teaching aeronautics engineering at KU, Jan Roskam influenced countless future aviation industry professionals. These days, his reach extends into the auto industry, too: Roskam’s first graduate student, former Boeing Co. CEO Alan Mulally, holds the same title at Ford Motor Co. “He taught me that the real purpose of airplanes was to get people together around the world,” Mulally said in an on-line tribute to Roskam at metacafe.com. “If you can get people together around the world, we all find out that we have more in common than we are different,” which Mulally said was indeed “a higher calling.” Roskam’s fingerprints have been all over American aviation since he immigrated from the Netherlands in 1957. He’s done design work for Boeing, Cessna, Beechcraft and Learjet, as well as for Italian planemakers Piaggio and Marchetti. “I’ve had the extremely good fortune to have been involved in 42 different airplane programs, and written a large number of books on design for safety,” Roskam says. He retired from the full-time faculty in 2003, but still teaches one-week short courses through KU, and is an adviser to DAR Corp., the Lawrence-based company he founded before selling his majority interest. Perhaps his greatest contribution has been to the study of air safety. In too many crashes, he says, investigators fall back on pilot or mechanic error, rather than probe for design flaws that may have led to those errors. Has his work, then, been life-saving? “I hope that’s true,” he says, “but there’s no way to prove it.”
Tom Trigg
Superintendent, Blue Valley School District
What makes a school district successful? Tom Trigg says it starts with students ready to learn, parents who get involved, teachers and staff with shared goals, a school board focused more on children than turf battles, and the backing of the business community, the faith community, and political leaders. He doesn’t count himself as a primary factor in that equation, but in the six years he’s been superintendent, the Blue Valley district has led the Kansas City region in average ACT scoring, raising the bar nearly every year. The district crossed the 24-point ACT threshold in 2006 and has been the only one in that territory since then. When Trigg talks about what makes the district such a special place, you can hear the love for education in his voice. No surprise there, given his background as the son of two math teachers. “The only career I ever wanted to have was in education, he says. “Even in high school, I recognized the influence that my teachers and coaches were having on me.” That influence led him into classroom instruction, then administrative work as a principal and assistant superintendent in the nearby Gardner-Edgerton district. Six years ago, with his three children in their teens or early adulthood, he and his family decided the time was right to reach for the top, and he took over in Blue Valley. A goal-driven vision for nearly 21,000 students succeeds, he says, because of the people involved: “Before you can even begin to set goals, you’ve got to have the right people.”
Sally Winship
Vice President, Johnson County Community College
The first clouds of construction dust had yet to settle when Sally Winship set up her work station at Johnson County Community College in 1973. JCCC was leaving behind its leased beginnings on Merriam Lane and on its way to becoming the crown jewel of the Kansas community college system. And Winship has been there every step of the way, influencing everything from course development to facilities planning as the 200-acre campus filled out. Most recently, she’s been vice president for workforce development. “The reason I came here and not anywhere else? It was a new program,” she says. “We had to develop everything. Every class we were putting together was brand new. It was very exciting.” That excitement carried over as her specialty—she was a dental hygienist by training before she began teaching it—gave way to a higher calling in administration, including earning a doctorate in it. Some rough numbers from that 37-year relationship, which will end on a full-time basis with her February retirement: More than 1 million miles logged on JCCC business, and well more than 400,000 students enrolled during her tenure. “That’s touching a lot of lives,” Winship says. The college has been home base, but Winship has been a player in multiple fields, sitting on boards for non-profits (Hope House is a favorite), working with chambers of commerce, economic development organizations and more. “I love getting people to work together,” she says, “I guess I’m a change agent, as well.”
Dale Dennis
Kansas Deputy Commissioner of Education
Dale Dennis has two grown sons—and about half a million kids in kindergarten through high school. That, basically, is the way he looks at his role as deputy commissioner for the Kansas State Department of Education, where he’s worked for 42 years. “We can’t afford to let them fail,” Dennis says. “I have a saying that when a student fails and they drop out, everybody who is involved ought to have a tear in their eye, because that’s a student we haven’t been able to reach.” His own efforts to reach students started as a teacher for 5½ years in Blue Mound, Kan., then in a two-year stint as a high school principal in LaCygne before signing on with the state. There, he’s helped shape educational policy as a financial guru, working behind the scenes on spending issues that affect every public school student in Kansas. Under his control is more than $3.5 billion in federal funding for K-12 education. In more than four decades, he’s missed exactly 10 days of work, all because of eye surgery about a decade ago. That’s just one measure of the dedication and drive he brings to his job. “What you’re trying to do is make a difference in those kids’ lives in a positive way. I’ve worked with a lot of governors and legislators over those years,” he said, “but I always try to keep the picture in front of me of the little kid on free lunches, struggling with not a lot of family support, to make sure that they have the opportunities that other kids do.”
