Stephen Adkison

Provost wants Henderson State to succeed in new era of education

Stephen Adkison wears many hats at Henderson State University. His titles of provost and vice president of academic affairs at HSU in Arkadelphia have him acting as the chief operations officer for the institution. In that capacity, he said, “It is my job to help maximize learning, scholarship and research. It is all about instruction. We are all here to support the faculty so they can teach the students.”
Stephen Adkison wears many hats at Henderson State University. His titles of provost and vice president of academic affairs at HSU in Arkadelphia have him acting as the chief operations officer for the institution. In that capacity, he said, “It is my job to help maximize learning, scholarship and research. It is all about instruction. We are all here to support the faculty so they can teach the students.”

Stephen Adkison, the new provost at Henderson State University, moved with his family to Arkansas from Le Grande, Oregon.

While he has lived in and around the Rocky Mountains since his late teens, and his children were raised in the high country of the American West, the Alabama native said he and his daughter connected with his Southern roots one evening in the backyard of their home in Arkadelphia.

“I had the feeling I had come home when I told my daughter about lightning bugs,” Adkison said. “She had never seen any before. She saw them in the yard and said they looked like fairies going through the woods.”

The provost, who acts as the chief operations officer at HSU, said he and his family believe they have come home in this place where they have never been. He said it gives his work at Henderson a special purpose.

“I want to work with the faculty,

the students and the community to

help continue to build this institution,” Adkison said. “I want it to be the kind of place where I can send my children.”

The provost described his job as leading the university’s academic enterprise so that it is both efficient and effective.

“It is my job to help maximize learning, scholarship and research,” Adkison said. “It is all about instruction. We are all here to support the faculty so they can teach the students.”

The task at the top of Adkison’s to-do list is to listen.

“I need to listen to everybody of every experience and background,” he said. “I need to get to know people and build on the strong ties we have with the community.”

The provost said education is not just a service to the communities in the area; it’s one of the strongest sections of the regions’s economy.

“With Henderson, National Park Community College, the College of the Ouachitas and Ouachita Baptist University across the street, education is one of the major employers in the region,” Adkison said. “Add in the Arkansas School for Mathematics, Sciences and the Arts and the very impressive public districts, and we have communities with a strong awareness of the importance of education.”

The secondary schools are preparing more students for college, and Henderson’s provost said the school must be ready for them.

“A goal has been set to double the number of students graduating from college by 2025,” Adkison said. “To meet that goal, we must not only recruit, but must offer what is needed to get the students in the door but also get them out the door as successful graduates.”

To accomplish those objectives,

the provost said Henderson must make sure its programs are flexible, responsive to the education needs of the community and able to continue to evolve over time. That evolution includes taking Henderson to where the students are located.

“We are all excited about having the Landmark building open at our Hot Springs campus by the first of next year,” Adkison said. “We are still holding classes on the NPCC campus and bringing Henderson to Hot Springs residents. Our director in Hot Springs, Christi Batts, is the perfect person for the job and a force in Hot Springs. HSU will be a part of the total community, not just an academic program.”

As the school’s vice president of academic affairs, Adkison said one of his major jobs is to help the faculty live up to their “ongoing commitment to excellence” by providing them exceptional opportunities to teach.

“Students here have an opportunity to do research in biology that is usually reserved for graduate students,” he said. “Teachers in the business school have their students engaged in projects as managers.”

Looking back on his career, Adkison said his first job was teaching.

“I was an outdoor education counselor at a day camp when I was 16,” he said. “I have always liked teaching, but it was not my plan to be a teacher when I started college at Auburn University. I majored in forestry, but I had my midlife crisis when I was in my 20s.”

After his first summer in college, Adkison took a summer job at Yellowstone National Park and never returned to Auburn.

“It was an amazing place to be,” he said. “I cooked for the park’s service people. I fought fires and was in the medics program. Everybody did everything back then.”

Encouraged to get a college degree, Adkison attended Montana State University in Bozeman and earned a degree in English/teaching in 1986. He spent two years teaching English and in the gifted-and-talented program at a Bozeman high school.

“I was helping fight the 1988 fires at Yellowstone, and they held me from returning to teaching,” he said. “I was not released until the snowfall finally put the fires out. By then, they had hired someone else.”

Adkison then taught skiing and worked as a professional chef.

“My wife married me because I could cook,” he said, laughing.

Working at a restaurant in California, he was encouraged to go back to graduate school. After moving to another job in Reno, Nevada, he went to school at the University of Nevada-Reno.

“I took a course in rhetoric, and I had a ball,” Adkison said. “Writing is a discipline that is used in every other discipline, which got me involved in interdisciplinary studies and got me my first administrative job as director of the university’s writing center.”

He received a master’s degree in English/writing in 1997 and a doctorate in English/rhetoric and composition in 2000.

Having gotten into administration, Adkison said, he continued to take leadership positions, working across different disciplines.

My father taught me that if you have an ability to do something,” Adkison said, “you then have a responsibility to do it.”

Before joining HSU, Adkison was provost and senior vice president for academic affairs at Eastern Oregon University in Le Grande.

“It is on the dry side of Oregon in a very rural area,” he said. “I soon found out that part of my job was to ride a horse in the local parades, and they seemed to have a lot of parades.”

The wooded campus and natural beauty of Arkansas were part of the attraction of the job at Henderson State. Other factors were the school’s history and tradition, and HSU’s president, Glen Jones.

“HSU is an exceptional institution with a distinguished history as Arkansas’ public liberal-arts university,” Adkison said.

“I am honored and deeply thrilled at the opportunity to further serve that history with President Jones and the students, faculty and staff.”

Jones said he is confident that Adkison will help the school achieve even higher levels of success.

“His character, passion, experience and commitment to faculty and student success will serve Henderson well,” Jones said.

Adkison said he believes he made the right choice.

“As I started to explore more about Henderson, I was impressed with the values and its vision,” he said. “This was not only a good place to work, but it was a place to call home.”

Staff writer Wayne Bryan can be reached at (501) 244-4460 or wbryan@arkansasonline.com.

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