Jim Collins President, Loras College.

TH: You were a finance major. You're now president of a college, and you have got all sorts of Ph.D.s around. You weren't really part of academia at all. Are you part of a trend in private higher education or are you more an anomaly, where you came from what I would say is the "business side." JC: Right. Twenty years ago, my profile would have been defined as an anomaly. Today, it's part of a growing trend. There was a book written in the mid-1990s entitled, "The Advancement Presidency." At that time, it was talked about how anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of all college presidencies were individuals who had a profile from institutional advancement, so not necessarily doctorally prepared, but certainly folks who had a lot of experience in institutional advancement. I don't know what the current day percentage is, but it's significantly higher. Just in the state of Iowa, among the 29 private colleges, 13 of us came from institutional advancement backgrounds. Again, you would have never seen that 10 years ago, let alone today. Really what that is, it's not an indictment on the importance of academics or classroom or teaching or doctorally prepared individuals. It really speaks to the complexity of higher education, especially private higher education today versus 10, 20 years ago. At the end of the day, for us to have great faculty, doing great things in the classroom, offering great programs to students, having modern-day technology, opportunities, it comes down to resources. For places like Loras, there are 550 private colleges out there who enroll less than 3,000 students, so we are in the majority of categories in higher education, 80 percent of our budgets are comprised by philanthropy and enrollment. So that almost always speaks to a presidency that has external relations background, who has a strong aptitude in fundraising and a strong ability to garner resources in such a way that the institution continues to move; but more importantly, that the academic world of the institution continues to be served well. So it's very rare nowadays that someone coming out of the classroom has had kind of extraordinary fundraising and enrollment experience that puts them in a position to address some of the complexities in private higher education. I think we'll see it more and more. TH: You mentioned students and chemical dependency. It's no secret that alcohol use and abuse among students nationwide is a concern. You, as well as the other local college presidents, have been forward in approaching the Dubuque City Council in terms of some of the ordinances related to alcohol consumption. What is Loras doing to address the challenge of alcohol and other chemical use -- but particularly alcohol use? JC: I think the most important is you start with perspective and you coincide it with the law. Perspective is this: Most college students, Loras or otherwise, have come not learning how to drink or taking their first drink at our respective institutions. The biggest change in the last 20-25 years is young people are starting the drinking game in or around middle school, so the challenge is you're inheriting students who have learned to drink and have experienced drink outside the boundaries, if you will, in a way that higher ed has never dealt with in the past. Second of all, versus 25 years ago, the legal drinking age is different. It wasn't too long ago that it was 18 and then 19; now it's 21. So the complexity of the very type of student you have now and what his or her obligation is with regard to the law is significantly different. The third thing -- going back to perspective now -- is we need to understand that drinking is going to occur. The first thing we need to do is make sure that we abide by the law and educate our students with regard to the law. But the highest focus we have as it relates to perspective is to curb and cut down what we define as being the highest level of at-risk drinking. To address that means having good behavioral standards, good citizen standards, and it does take the village, for lack of a better term, partnership between all of us as higher ed institutions, but a partnership with the city, partnership with the local establishments, and that's a huge challenge. What we try and do here at Loras, we have an initiative this year lead by students who choose not to drink or choose not to drink a lot, creating a series of activities and promotions and initiatives whereby nightly and on every weekend, there are a large number of activities that give the student who chooses not to drink marvelous opportunities to be in an environment that they're comfortable with. The second thing is we're partnering with our student senate. An example is this weekend. Our student senate is leading an effort among the student body to say, "Let's come and put forth campus pride and be great representatives of Loras and "Let's make sure that drinking is not a part of this as we open up our football season," as an example. The other thing that we're doing is to say that we will have low to no tolerance for all the adverse affects of drinking. So we will have a zero tolerance for vandalism, harmfulness to others. Those are our highest priorities. At least as of right now, if you compare what's happened in the first three weeks of the school year this year versus what happened the first three weeks the last school year -- damage, issues of student discipline cases are significantly down. Now, does that mean that something might not happen tomorrow? No. But does it mean that we've taken some good steps and seen signs of success? Yes. And at the end of the day, the most important thing is not so much strong policy. It's partnering with the student body and having them at the peer level lead this effort with regard to better citizenship. TH: Any other new programs on the academic front? JC: In recent years we began an Electro-Mechanical Engineering major. It's a four-year major. We're the only private college in the state that offers such a program. We've seen demonstrative growth in the number of students majoring in that area. We also have partnered with St. Ambrose University and have begun this year a shared program in a master's program in Educational Leadership. St. Ambrose and Loras share resources and enroll students and depending on where they choose to actually take the classes, they go to that respective campus and so we share in the syllabus, we share in the curricular initiative and ultimately being together allows us to have a strong case for accreditation. So, we're doing creative things like that. We'll see where the program goes, but obviously teaching and education is a high and desperate need in society. TH: How is the fund drive for the athletic and wellness portion of the capital improvement program going? JC: First of all, when we announced the campaign, our mistake was announcing at a time when we hadn't raised any money yet. Normally, when you announce a campaign, you have about half of the money pledged or in hand. Secondly, unbeknownst to us, we had the presidential transitions here and we also experienced 9/11. So that put us behind the 8-Ball, if you will, with regard to this campaign. We reconceived the campaign this last summer and the overall facility plan. That's why the Rock Bowl was started. So that what we're shooting now for is a $20 million. That brings to life the Rock Bowl renovations and the new athletic and wellness center with the primary components being a new fitness center, basketball and volleyball arena and locker rooms. We're about halfway there and pretty confident that in the next year, we will have all of the monies pledged and/or in hand so that we can go to the next stage of this facility, component. Then, like most other private institutions, we won't be finished there. There will be another project and another series of initiatives. TH: Your brother-in-law, Brad Soderberg, has had quite a career as a basketball coach - some ups and some downs. JC: Brad is one of the most passionate folks I've ever met as it relates to his profession and his love for basketball. And while I'm so impressed and deeply admire all he's done in basketball and his professional career, the thing that I was always drawn to about and to Brad from Day 1 is he's one of the kindest people I've ever met. One of the best Christians I've ever met. He is mature in an appropriate way, beyond his years of life would represent. He's a great family man, great husband, great father, great friend. He'd do anything for anybody. At the end of the day, that's what drives him most, is his faith life and his family. It's not basketball. And I think his success in basketball is because of his appropriate focus. TH: How would you describe your management style? JC: I like to think I'm collaborative. Very communicative. I try and be mindful of the delicate balance of leadership in terms of empowerment, but also understanding day-by-day, having been here for 21 years, I'm also capable of micro-management. But I really believe in the trust and empowerment theory as much as possible, but I also understand that most individuals, despite what they say, want a clear set of directions and expectations. So I try to do the best of both worlds. It's one of those things where in life, as you live this leadership role, you're never fully there. So what my theory and perspective is and what I believe my practice to be may not necessarily be consummate, but it's something that I always strive and work on. TH: So, if you see the train heading down the wrong track, you feel some need to get involved, even if it's the domain of another department ... JC: Yeah, very much so. I think, as I think about a couple of mistakes I've made in the first year, it's probably that I trusted and stayed back and waited to find out what the result was. In hindsight, I probably should have intervened sooner. The most important trait that I think I draw upon is I want feedback. What I tell our administrative team is it may be hard to tell me, it may be difficult for me to hear, but the most important obligation you have to this institution, not to me, is to tell me all the bad news, all the concerns ideally most directly related to your area, but also if you have observations or hearsay with regard to other areas. Then I can make improvements. I've been really blessed to have a group of individuals around me who are blatantly honest with me in a team meeting and with me one-on-one. Again, it's hard sometimes to hear; it's sometimes hard to reconcile, but I really think that that's lead to a lot of our ability to have success here as an institution. TH: You mentioned the collaboration with St. Ambrose. Then you also mentioned community colleges. I was at a breakfast not long ago at Northeast Iowa Community College, where (President) Penny Wills was beating the drum to try and get more involved with Loras - with credit transfers, that type of program. Do you perceive closer programming or working relationship with NICC in the future? JC: Oh, I think so. All of our experiences with NICC have been very positive. Students who transfer in from NICC demonstrate great ability in the classroom and have graduated with high success. We're a very traditional college. For years, unlike many of our private competitors, we're primarily comprised of traditional age, first-year, full-time residential students. So this business of transfer and community college articulation agreements has been somewhat foreign to Loras. We believe in a couple of things. One is that community colleges are different from private colleges. Private colleges are different than regent universities. We all serve a purpose. The mistake that we make as institutions, categorically and specifically, is we forget mission. It's important that we not become a research or multiple graduate college, like regent universities, because that's their mission. Just the same as we ought not go into the business of, for instance, business training, like a community college does because that's not our mission. So what we want to do is partner with the community college whereby there is obvious sense and that is primarily students who want to persist to a four-year liberal arts undergraduate degree. I've been very favorably impressed with Penny Wills and have very much cherished the relationship we've been able to build in the first year. So what that will mean specifically in terms of partnership and collaboration, I don't know yet. TH: Do I see a marathon picture in the display cabinet there? Did you run a marathon? JC: I did. I wanted to do it before I turned 40. I went, some friends, most of whom graduated from Loras, and a brother-in-law all ran it. We decided to run in a pack. We had this agreement that if at any point we wanted to drop back or run ahead, we would do that. So for the first half of the race, we did it all together. I really wanted to break four hours. At the halfway mark, we were at 2:16. I thought oh, boy. "Guys, I love ya and I'm out of here." I went and finished it at 3:54, so I did a great job on the second half. They still hassle me about saying "So much for friendship; it was all about competition." TH: To go slow-fast for a marathon is a tough business. JC: All the advice I got prior to running it was go slowly out of the gate. Don't lose all your energy and your focus early. I took the advice and good things happened. TH: What year was that? JC: That would have been three years ago, October of 2002. TH: Any other marathon plans? JC: Not at all. My youngest brother is kind of telling me that we should do a Brother Thing. Up to this point, it's all been talk. We haven't made any plans. But I continue to try and run. If I get out four or five times a week for four or five miles a day, I'm doing pretty well. Travel in some ways makes that easier because I feel less guilty about being away from the office or being away from the family. But the schedule does make it tough. Going into the winter months makes it even tougher. I'm finding that metabolism at my age is starting to catch up and I'm also finding that lots of time eating out, both lunch and dinner catches up, so running continues to be a high focus for me. TH: You'd mentioned earlier that a high percentage of students here are involved in varsity sports as opposed to intramural and so on. Loras is a Division III school, meaning it doesn't give athletic scholarships and so on. What role does athletics play in campus life, say at a Division III school versus what you might see at a major university or with Division I football and basketball and so on? Is there much difference between the two? JC: I think there's significant difference. I think that first of all, athletics gets a bad rap. Second of all, for a place like Loras, I take mission really seriously. And one of the key phrases in our mission statement talks about the total development of the student. If you believe in the total development of the student, that means you need to cherish their curricular, their classroom experience, as well as their experiential and their co-curricular experience. And athletics here plays a powerful co-curricular role. These young people play for the love of the game. These young people are motivated not by the dollars their getting or the tuition and support their getting; but they're motivated because this is an important and integral part of their life and they understand that what they're learning in the classroom can be aided and abetted by what their learning on the court, on the field, on the mat throughout their life. And I believe at Loras that we do it right and all the stats bear that out. The average GPA among our student-athletes is actually higher than the average GPA among the overall student body. When you look at issues of citizenship, ranging from our student body president this year and our student body president last year, both of them are student athletes. When you look at the top 10 percent of our graduates, a good majority of them are students who have participated in intercollegiate athletics. Division III just did a major financial aid audit among its 550 institutions to find out how many of the Division III institutions were, for a lack of a better term, cheating as it relates to financial aid. Loras was one of the 40 percent among all 550 that was doing it right. The variance and the aid awards for our student athletes was close to zero versus that aid awards to the general student body. We can and we should be proud of that. Going forward, we're, like all the rest of our students, we're expecting them to have a higher role in citizenship as well. I think a great example is our head football coach is a marvelous role model for our students and the student athletes. And what I've heard faculty and staff talk about regarding him and his role is when they hear him speak to prospective students and family, the last thing he talks about is football. He begins by talking about the academic experience. He talks about community and family. Talks about what they need to do with regard to citizenship and with regard to behavior. And then at the end of the day, he talks about how he'd like to have a very strong football program and like the son to play a strong role in that. TH: So, you don't have a situation where the prospective student's academic record is rewarded disproportionately just because he happens to be a star quarterback. JC: No, not at all. In fact, I would say, sometimes we err on the other side. I'm not sure that that's ultimately fair, but we oftentimes err on the other side. What we really look for is to say what is the student's record? What is their citizenship record? And then what is their motivation? If the motivation is solely related to athletics, then there's something wrong and that causes us to take a second look.