Gov. John Hickenlooper has appointed First National Bank of Durango Chairman of the Board Steven Short to a second four-year team as a trustee for Fort Lewis College.
Short, a Durango native who attended Fort Lewis before graduating from Colorado State University, also chairs the Business Affairs Committee that reports to the board.
“Higher education is undergoing huge changes – from a funding standpoint, from society’s expectations of higher education, from employers’ expectation of higher education,” he said.
And it doesn’t change easily, he said.
“Some of their institutionalized traditions have been part of academia for 500 years,” Short said. “I do think, over the course of the last few years, Fort Lewis is embarking on a recognition of those changes. I can’t personally take credit for it, but the board has been holding very challenging, very controversial discussions about ‘What will the future look like?’”
Being on the board has been a bit of an eye-opener, he said.
“A lot of people can be an armchair expert,” Short said. “It’s easy to look from the outside and sort of think you have all the answers. But once on the inside, it’s not so simple.”
The board has been a change from the 15 months he spent on the Durango School District 9-R school board.
“That was very emotional: ‘It’s my child.’ ‘I’m the parent.’ Nothing to do with the educational component,’” Short said. “I remember one of the biggest issues we dealt with was whether or not the time students spent moving between classes should be counted as academic time, seat time or passing time.”
Some parents said it should count as academic time, or the days would be too long and their children would have to work too hard, he said, and others were adamant it was not educational time.
One of the things he enjoys about the Fort Lewis College board is the ability to take it back to the big issues, which may occasionally have emotion attached, but nothing like the parent of a grade-school student, he said.
“We’re asking questions like ‘What’s best from an academic setting standpoint?’ ‘What’s best for the student experience?’” he said. “‘Where are we from a funding and resource standpoint, and how do we dedicate those resources to do what we need to do to meet those educational objectives?’”
Coming up on the board’s and Fort Lewis’ to-do list is a review of the results from the more than yearlong reaccreditation process through the Higher Education Commission, he said. The results are due in about two months.
“In addition to renewing accreditation, it’s an opportunity to do a broad-based internal evaluation,” Short said, “and now we need to search for opportunities in that information for what we do to improve within the organization.”
abutler@durangoherald.com
