As retirement nears, Lori Sundberg views Kirkwood presidency fondly

When Lori Sundberg was introduced as Kirkwood Community College’s fifth president in December 2017, she knew in her heart that the position would mark her last full-time job in higher education. And now that her retirement date is quickly approaching, Ms. Sundberg says she’s proud of her accomplishments as the leader of Iowa’s second-largest community college – and of the progress of the college as a whole. “Coming to Kirkwood was the single best decision of my entire career,” Ms. Sundberg said in a recent sit-down interview with the CBJ. “I made it late in my career, but it was the best decision I made. I've really thoroughly enjoyed being here.” Ms. Sundberg announced her intent to retire Nov. 7, 2022, via a campus-wide email. At the time, Kirkwood officials said Ms. Sundberg planned to continue in her role as president through Kirkwood’s accreditation visit with the Higher Learning Commission – a visit completed earlier this month. After a nationwide search, Kristie Fisher, president of Iowa Valley Community College District and former senior director for ACT, was announced as Kirkwood’s sixth president at a news conference May 4. Ms. Fisher is set to formally begin her new role Monday, Oct. 30, the day after Ms. Sundberg’s official retirement Sunday, Oct. 29. Ms. Sundberg was introduced as Kirkwood’s fifth president in December 2017, replacing Mick Starcevich. In the process, she also became the first woman to serve as Kirkwood president. Ms. Sundberg came to Kirkwood from her alma mater, Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois, where she had served as president since 2010. “Next month, it will be five years since the Kirkwood Board of Trustees announced me as the fifth president of Kirkwood Community College,” Ms. Sundberg wrote in an email to Kirkwood faculty and staff announcing her retirement. “And it seems hard to believe that five years has flown by already, but it has, and I submitted my letter of intent to retire next year. So, I’m not going anywhere for a while, but I did give the Board of Trustees a year’s notice to do a search and to find my replacement. “You know, it’s really with mixed and bittersweet emotions that I submitted that letter of intent,” she added. “It’s hard to know when is the right time to retire. But what I can tell you is that it feels like we’ve accomplished our goals that we set out to accomplish the last five years. Despite the pandemic and despite the derecho, I just feel like after our Higher Learning Commission visit next October, it will be a good time for a transition. We’ve worked hard to be a good partner to the Higher Learning Commission, and its accreditation visit is a significant milestone in an institution’s history.” Here, in a question-and-answer format, is a summary of Ms. Sundberg’s views on her pre-Kirkwood career, her time at Kirkwood, and what the future holds for her. CBJ: Give me a brief overview of your career that led to you being here. Ms. Sundberg: So I started my career at Carl Sandburg College in Galesburg, Illinois, which was my hometown. I was an alum of Carl Sandburg. I had my entire career there. I moved up the ranks and fully expected to retire from there. CBJ: What were your roles there? Ms. Sundberg: I was actually an adjunct first, then I went into institutional research. Then I went into human resources and organizational development. I used to say that I was first with data, which was very black and white for me, and then I went over to HR, which is people. Nothing is black and white. Every situation is unique, because it pertains to each employee in their individual circumstances. Then I went over to become a vice president of administrative services. And then before I became president, I was in academic affairs. CBJ: And you became president when? Ms. Sundberg: They announced it in October of 2009, and I took over July 1, 2010. Then I spent eight years there before the consultant for the Kirkwood search called me. Someone that I knew, Larry Evers – he's very well known here in Iowa, but he's also well known across the country – reached out to me about this position. He knew I had spent my entire career there, and he said, ‘I think you should look at this.’ And I said, ‘You know, I'm just going to retire from here. This is my hometown. I spent my whole career here.’ And he said, ‘Yeah, I know. But you should really look at this.’ So I talked to my husband, and he said ‘that’s not really the plan that we have.’ And I said, ‘No, it really isn't, but it looks intriguing.’ So I submitted my materials, got the initial interview, and became a final candidate. So then I had to consider whether I was going to be on Plan A or Plan B, and I chose Plan B. To be here. CBJ: Staying there might have been more comfortable in some ways. Ms. Sundberg: It would have been super comfortable. I had a trustee from there say, ‘Lori, you've got this. All you’ve got to do is coast.’ But anyone who knows me knows I'm not a coaster. And Kirkwood is a lot like my former institution. It’s just a lot larger and much more innovative. And Cedar Rapids just felt (like) a good fit.

CBJ: Were there other things about Kirkwood in particular? Ms. Sundberg: Kirkwood has a reputation of being very innovative, and it has lots of locations. It's a large institution, and I had spent my entire career in a small institution, so it felt like a really big challenge to me. And it has been very different from my job (at Carl Sandburg). When you’re a large institution, particularly with the impact that Kirkwood has, a lot of my job has been externally focused on the communities, making sure that we're serving the workforce needs and working with the city. That piece of being the Kirkwood president is kind of an external piece. CBJ: Can you go through some of your accomplishments since you've arrived here? Ms. Sundberg: I don't focus a lot on successes, because I just keep on going. What I focus on tends to be areas where we can improve, because I feel like that's my job. But one of the things I did focus on was accreditation for us. That was a big one. Accreditation has changed over the years, and Kirkwood was on a former type of accreditation that was being phased out to move into a new program. We also worked on the student experience. Persistence, retention, and completion, student success, all of those measures really speak to a student's ability to get through. So we adopted Guided Pathways early on, which is just a monumental effort. We started that in 2019, but it will be with us forever. You just keep making iterations of change as you continue to learn and implement new programs. Of course, diversity, equity and inclusion has been a focus for me as well. And financial stability, obviously. You know, we ended up having to close three facilities, two of our smaller centers as well as Iowa City, as we continued to react to the changes in higher ed. The Iowa City facility in particular was 99% liberal arts, and liberal arts is on the decline across the country, so we had to decide how to respond to that and make good use of the resources we have. So we moved away from that facility. I think it was absolutely the right decision, but it was a really difficult decision to make. For employees, they're very attached to that site, because that's where they've had their career. (NOTE: Kirkwood continues to maintain a significant presence in Johnson County, operating the Kirkwood Regional Center at the University of Iowa in Coralville.) CBJ: Any other things workforce-based? Ms. Sundberg: We developed a partnership with the city of Cedar Rapids for a last-dollar scholarship. And that is all for career tech education. We're trying to grow the workforce here in Cedar Rapids, and that was a program that I worked on with Jeff Pomerantz and others with the city. I'm really proud of that. And we've done a ton on the continuing ed and workforce training side. And I forgot the aviation program. (Eastern Iowa Airport director) Marty Lenss came to me right after I got here and talked to me about an aviation program, and as a college president, the last thing you want to start is a program like that, because they're super expensive. But we continued to do the research, and Marty said he knew there would be support and funding for this. Then, of course, the pandemic happened, and that stopped everything for a period of time. I wasn't sure we were going to get back on track with it. But we did, and we have gotten funding for it. The airport has been a tremendous partner to us. And they provided the hangar to us at a lower cost so we could get started. In terms of workforce, that’s probably the program I'm most proud of. It’s super needed in Iowa and across the country. And we're hoping that once we get the mechanic program started, then we can transition to a pilot program.

CBJ: What does enrollment look like this year? Ms. Sundberg: So far this year, we’re up around 2% in headcount and credit hours. We’re somewhere around (16,000) for the full year right now. Prior to that, we had been trending downward. And that's all across higher education. Our programs that are still very robust would be all of our allied health programs. Our construction program is good. We just renovated our auto tech area. And we are number one in the country for two-year schools in terms of the number of graduates in ag programs, so that's still very strong. Our career and tech education CTE programs, for the most part, are good. We’ve seen a softening in our liberal arts programs. And again, that’s a nationwide trend. CBJ: So you're moving more toward career-focused programming. Ms. Sundberg: I don't know if we're moving more towards it. But that’s where we have strength right now in terms of investment students want and in terms of enrollment. If it’s 10 years from now, and I’m looking back, we probably have slightly fewer career tech programs that are the most robust ones. It's hard to have every career tech program that you think you might need, because they're super expensive. So I think we’ll become more specialized. Fewer programs, but more enrollment in each one. That would be my guess. CBJ: Speaking of that, there have been a few programs that have been cut, (including) the dental technology program and the energy production program. Ms. Sundberg: And then the commercial class A truck driving section. Those are all changes based on enrollment trends. We react to the job and career markets. The economy has changed over the last 10 or 20 years, and we have to stay nimble and react to that. There are some career tech programs that we’ll probably have forever, and others that will cycle out. That's just the nature of what we do. CBJ: Talk a little bit about some of the changes in the way people learn. Remote learning, things like that. Are most students back in-person or are there still remote options? Ms. Sundberg: Kirkwood tends to be a college that likes to be face-to-face with our students. Over the pandemic, they had to go remote, so they did get more comfortable with it. After the pandemic, we've seen a little bit bigger appetite for people to do remote learning, but we're still probably below the national average in terms of people being entirely online. Our students like being face-to-face. That's the experience that we get here. Our students are really engaged and they feel supported. We have a lot of student activities on campus and students want that traditional experience. But right now, they also want some flexibility. So I think the hybrid option is going to emerge as the top choice, where they can be face-to-face for some portion of their course, but then also have some flexibility with that online piece.

CBJ: You’ve talked a lot about the derecho and the pandemic. What were the biggest challenges you had to overcome? Everybody had their own set of challenges, but maybe there were things that relate to community college settings. Ms. Sundberg: I think the biggest challenge early on was not knowing, the uncertainty of how long it was going to last. I've talked about it with the cabinet. You know, there wasn't anything in our history to look back to and say, Okay, so this is kind of like that. That's what we did then, so we should probably think about it this time. There's no playbook, no situation that you can liken it to. We would say in cabinet, we're on our own. We're here to make the best decisions we can. And we were more open here than some of my colleagues from across the country in terms of when we brought people back into the offices. We closed the third week of March. I was back in the office the first week of June. Then we had two different phases, in the first part of July, then again in August. That's not to say that we didn't still have people working remote and in the office, because in areas where we couldn't socially distance people, we kept them apart that way. I felt that the more normalcy we could give people during this time (was important) in the face of all this stuff. We were responding to the pandemic, and we were responding to our students’ needs and our employee needs. That's not to say we didn't offer a whole lot of flexibility, because we did. Employees could be taking care of aging parents, and then their students would sometimes be online, or they'd be at home and they’d be unwell. We tried to do it on a case-by-case basis so we could keep Kirkwood a source of support for our students. Providing that constancy, I think, was helpful during that time, because there just wasn't a lot of certainty anywhere. Justin Hoehn, Kirkwood Media Relations director: Everybody thinks ‘that'll never happen to us.’ But Lori was on that, I don't know how early. We were in meetings for like three or four weeks, and as we were listening to the rumblings in China, she was on top of it. She knew we had to do something to be prepared. I think that's why it went so smoothly. Ms. Sundberg: Honestly, It went as smoothly as possible. We were talking about it pretty early, saying ‘if we had to do this, what would it look like?’ I can remember talking to Bill Lamb, our Vice President for Academic Affairs, and he said, ‘what do you mean?’ I said, ‘What if we can't come to class, come to the college?’ He said, ‘like that's really going to happen.’ I said ‘I think it could.’ And then it did. CBJ: Then you had the derecho. How many days were you delayed? Ms. Sundberg: We delayed the start of the school semester by seven days. It was right before we were supposed to start, and we didn't have power. A lot of our students lost their housing. And we had major damage. Like $3 or $4 million. Our enrollment dropped that fall, and it dropped even more than some of the other Iowa colleges because of the derecho. We were hit harder here than some of the other areas of the state. I couldn’t even imagine what our students were facing, with the pandemic and then the derecho. I’m sure it just felt to them like there's no way they could go to college. We saw it with all colleges, not just with the derecho here, but all colleges were seeing a decline in enrollment as students were saying ‘I can't do it,’ stopping out and taking a break. CBJ: You've talked about this being your last job before retirement. What factors led to your decision to retire now? Ms. Sundberg: I really thought I'd probably stay a little bit longer. But you want to leave and have the transition at a good breaking point for the institution. So it's not just about what I want to do, but it's also about the institution. We have an accreditation visit next Monday and Tuesday (note: this interview was conducted before the accreditation visit  Oct. 2-3). I wanted to get through that for sure. And so then after that, the next solid breaking point would have been three or four years out. I wasn’t sure I wanted to work quite that long. And if I was not going to stay that long, this was probably the transition place. And then the next president can get comfortable before the next accreditation visit. You don't want to work too long, where your retirement is filled with doctor's appointments. My husband's older, so I wanted to make sure that I retired in time for us to enjoy our family. We have grandkids in South Carolina, and I've missed a lot over the years of them growing up with the job I've had.

CBJ: Do you have other plans for the future, any aspirations or things you want to do? Are you planning to stay active in education or do you just want to be be fully retired? Ms. Sundberg: I think I'm going to be fully retired. If something presented itself, I would like to serve on some boards locally. I'm going to be (moving to) South Carolina. But beyond that, I don't have any plans. I'm never going to say never for anything, but I have no plans for it. CBJ: You've served on a number of boards here. Ms. Sundberg: I think I'd like to do that. I’m just going to wait and see how it unfolds. CBJ: Any other trends you see as far as Kirkwood and the higher education system in the state? Ms. Sundberg: Kirkwood is going to continue to be a driver. The economic impact Kirkwood makes, both in terms of the size of the institution and our graduates, is really staggering. I continue to see that Kirkwood is going to play an important role in economic development here and in workforce development. We're going to be the key player for that in the next 10 years for sure. CBJ: You also have a lot of those partnerships that you mentioned. Ms. Sundberg: We have a lot of partnerships with business. And we respect our business partners. I think they really appreciate us too, because we are very responsive to their needs. CBJ: When you got here, were you surprised by Kirkwood’s impact in the community? Ms. Sundberg: I would say that Kirkwood is so beloved in the region and so respected, and that's not true for every community college across the country. And it’s been earned by Kirkwood. CBJ: You've set some precedents of your own right. You're the first female president at Kirkwood, so I'm sure that's important too when you review your accomplishments. Ms. Sundberg: I was the first female at Carl Sandburg College as well, and the first (alum to serve as president). It carries more responsibility. When you're the first, people are paying more attention, so it carries a little bit more weight. I've always tried to be aware of that and to set a good example. CBJ: You mentioned other diversity efforts as well. Ms. Sundberg: I'm first generation college myself, so that's the other thing that we've done since I've been here. TRIO grants are for first-generation, low-income students. We only had one (TRIO program) when I got here, and now we have five. They're federal programs, about a million dollars each. They're for that underserved population, first-generation, low-income. And that's hugely important to me, because that's where I came from. I went to community college myself, and it transformed my life. I see it happening with people every day that come into the community college, looking for a better future. They find a new career, and it transforms their lives. CBJ: So the transition to Kristie Fisher has already begun. Ms. Sundberg: I wrap up Sunday, Oct. 29, and then Kristie starts on Monday, Oct. 30. She's been onboarding with me a couple days a month since the announcement. She comes over here typically on board meeting days and stays the next day, and then she's been meeting with the vice presidents and taking tours, so when she starts that day, she's ready to go. She’ll hit the ground running. She went to college here, and she worked here before. It was a different Kirkwood when she was here, but she knows Kirkwood. No lapse in leadership. CBJ: Any other future plans to mention? Ms. Sundberg: I'm doing an online continuing education class right now in Spanish, trying to get some of those skills back. I’m taking an actual class with other Kirkwood continuing ed students. I'm also doing an intro to fiction writing class. I like to write a lot, but I write more on the nonfiction side, like research articles. I've never dipped my toe into fiction. I have reached out to a couple of writing conferences to find out if they are going to have space next year. I told my husband that I was thinking of applying for the master's MFA at Iowa for writing. I've always wanted to do some more writing. So that's probably in my future.