Back to the Northwest

The man who thought he would never go to college wandered the halls of North Idaho College. He peeked into a few rooms and offices. One woman was sitting at her desk and asked him if he was new here.

He said “Yes, what do you do here?”

She told him, then asked him the same question back.

“I’m the new president,” he said.

Rick MacLennan arrived in Coeur d’Alene Saturday, July 9, to take on his new position.

He grew up in southern California where he worked at his parents’ gas stop. When he got out of high school, he joined the army in Alaska. He went on to run a plumbing company in Portland, Ore., and was fine with it for a few years, until he hurt his back and couldn’t work for the summer.

It was then, while he was injured and unable to move around much, that his friend convinced him to use his G.I. benefits to attend Portland State University.

When he went into the office of the Vice President of Student Affairs to turn in his military paperwork, he was offered a work study job in the office.

He accepted the job and it changed his life forever.

“Watching how we did it and did it well and where we could have done it better was really interesting,” he said. “So I went in to a graduate program at Oregon State University for college student services.”

He finished his four years at Portland and went on to get his master’s degree at Oregon State University in college student services.

He found a few different jobs working in his field in Louisiana and Maryland. MacLennan pursued his doctorate degree at Wellington University in Delaware and he and his family decided it was time to move back to the Northwest. He accepted a job as the vice president of student services at Olympic College in Washington and stayed there for 12 years.

Then he was offered his first job as president of a college in Maryland again. He accepted, but he and his wife always wanted to return to the Northwest. When the position opened up at NIC, he knew it was for him.

“When the NIC position became open, it was obvious,” he said. “I am just grateful and humbled that they chose me. ”

MacLennan sat down with The Press to talk about his future here in Coeur d’Alene and at NIC.

• • •

What is something about Coeur d’Alene that you did not expect?

I haven’t met one person yet that has told what is wrong with Coeur d’Alene. Everyone is positive, they love the community, they talk positively about the people in the community, they are optimistic, and that resonates with my philosophy on life. I don’t know if that surprised me, but the depth of it and the volume of it has been just wonderful.

What is something that you’ve learned in your previous experiences that you are excited to bring here?

Really listening. I will ask the question to the community: Is this college relevant to what you need it to be? “You” being the community. And if we’re not relevant, help us understand what would make us more relevant.

That whole conversation between NIC, and what NIC can be and can offer and how we can connect the work that we do to the needs of the community — educational, economic development, personal growth — because I don’t believe we have one person to waste here. So if we’re connecting with our mission and what the community needs us to be, then we will be meeting the needs of everybody, or as many people as possible.

For me to engage that way, and to be authentically responsive that way, if we get a question, and an answer, we need to do something about that. The great thing about NIC is that it’s already doing it. It’s not going to happen just because I’m here, but one of the reasons why I was interested in being here, is what I learned during the application process, building on the work of Joe Dunlap, Joe and his team, now my team, what they were doing over the past four years were the same things I was engaging in my community. So I found it very attractive to step in and build on that and continue that work.

But I think the meaningful connection with people outside our own walls, to make sure they understand how to become part of our story, and be interested in being part of our story, then everybody benefits.

I spent six years figuring that out in various ways, it’s not rocket science, it’s just listening.

What are some goals you have for NIC? What are some things you want to do?

I want to figure out where all the bathrooms are.

I’m learning my way around. I’ve mentioned the work that Joe Dunlap has done to really get the college moving in a really good direction, and it’s my goal to learn more about that, get to know as many people in the community as I can that we should have a connection with and hear from them about how they see us working together to go forward.

Obviously workforce and economic development and helping create opportunities for people to be in living wage jobs, those are all important.

I think the basic thing is to make sure that we meet the needs of our students and make sure that every conversation we have here is putting students at the center of the conversation because, I’ll go back to what I said before, we don’t have one person to waste. We’ve got to get it as right as we possibly can with every student we serve, and that should drive everything we do.

I know enrollment is down, do you have any thoughts or plans to address that?

Sure, there’s already a lot of work going on to address that. In the sense of being an academic institution, we have a product and services that we provide, and there’s a value to those things, it means something to the people who take advantage of them.

If you’re in a classic marketing sense, not to make that this is a business model, I don’t mean to imply that it is, but if you have a value proposition that is clear and apparent to somebody, they’re going to want to take advantage of that.

So, it goes back to are all of our programs and services aligned to what the community needs it to be? If you can align those more directly in terms of the products and services and then how you provide support for people coming through your program, in my experience, enrollment will take care of itself.

Do you have any ideas or concerns about the funding for the college?

Well, I think that’s where the enrollment question come in. The college appears to be well supported, we’re creating the CTE facility, we have programs we are building — we are not in a retention mode where we’re having to cut programs and services. We’re shifting resources to maybe focus on one area or set of priorities over something that we don’t have as much of a need for.

I don’t know enough yet about all the funding streams and I haven’t met with the state folks and the Legislature yet. What we know is that NIC is just like every other academic institution in the country in the sense that the wants and the needs and the things we can do, probably always outpace the resources we have to do them.

That’s why we have to be very strategic about what we choose to do and it goes back to the connections with the community. We need to be relevant to the needs here because these are scarce resources that we’re responsible for shepherding to do the work that we’re doing.

Are we satisfied? Would we like to have more? Of course. In any world in what we do, to be able to offer greater levels of personal service and education, is always desirable.

From what I have learned in the very short time that I’ve been here, we’re doing a really good job with the resources we have to meet the needs of the community.

What is a quality in people you admire the most?

The one I value the most is people who are generous with how they treat other people. I don’t mean charitable in terms of giving, I mean charitable in terms of their attitude and personality toward other people. That means people who listen well, who want to be helpful, who want to help solve problems. You know ’em when you see ’em and they’re the greatest people to have around you.

Another one is honesty. It’s a light switch for me, it’s either on or off — and you know it when you see it and you know it if you don’t have it.