MCC then and now

I attended the retirement party this past Wednesday for another longtime professor at McCook Community College and it provided me the opportunity to pause and reflect on what MCC used to be and what it is now. Three years ago, Jim Garretson, Jim Hall and I all retired and left the college with almost 100 years of teaching experience and now Lynn Salyer has retired with almost 40 years of experience. Without sounding self – serving, no business can afford to lose that much expertise and stay the same.

But a college, although a business, is unique in itself and especially a community college. We have almost a complete turnover in students every two years so people who retired over two years ago have no connection with the students today. So is the case with Jim, Jim and me and will be the case with Lynn in two more years. So even though our replacements may have little experience compared with our own, that fact will go beyond the awareness of new students who won’t know the difference.

But the college itself changes when the old guard is replaced by the new guard, especially in a situation that demanded a unification of different colleges as our situation did upon my arrival here. MCC in 1995 was nothing like it is now. We had our own President, Bob Smallfoot and our own Vice-President and Dean of Instruction, John Rucker and both were in possession of doctorate degrees. We had our own registrar and all records were kept at MCC. We had already been ordered to merge with North Platte Community College but the merge at that time was pretty much in name only. That was to change quickly.

We went through a series of Presidents that altered the face and definition of MCC. Our own President and Vice-President were eliminated, as well as our registrar. Student and personnel records were sent to North Platte instead of being kept here as they always had been before. This was met with an overall negative reaction from an entrenched MCC faculty, most who had been here for decades. There has been a rumor ever since the order to merge with North Platte came about that we hated North Platte and their faculty and personnel. It wasn’t so much a matter of hate than simply not knowing them and not wanting to know them. MCC is the oldest Junior College in Nebraska and with that reputation came a great deal of pride along with individual and group ownership. We had existed for a long time on our own and saw no reason to merge with another college that we saw as inferior to our own, although larger because of its location in a larger metropolitan area.

For the past 25 years we have fought to maintain the name and integrity of McCook Community College in the face of almost yearly threats to change it. Our academic President has been replaced by a businessman, along with several support personnel who are all housed in North Platte. Instead of having local division chairs, we now have area chairs and most of the chairs are from North Platte. In other words, most of our autonomy and integrity as an individual institution has been slowly but inevitably stripped from us.

Because of that, the faculty that for a while had the longest tenure of any college faculty in the state decided to leave what they saw as a sinking ship. So we lost Stan Garretson, Jim Steward, Rod Horst, Judy Haney, Glenn Haney, Roger Wilson, Lyle Moskel, Dick Driml, Ted Fellers, Sue Watts, Jim Garretson, Jim Hall, Chet DeVaughn, Mike Hendricks and now Lynn Salyer which made the new hires only a few years ago now the senior faculty at the college. Our Administration would likely argue that although the faculty has changed drastically, it hasn’t necessarily changed for the worst.

Maybe it hasn’t. But personally speaking from an educational experience that included teaching at universities and four-year colleges before taking my first community college teaching job at MCC, we haven’t necessarily changed for the better either.