The president of Pulaski Technical College was once the starting center for the Iowa State University Cyclones. Centers are vertical creatures disinclined to bend their knees at the foul line, but even today, at 54, Margaret Ellibee’s defensive stance is really low. Inside the Jim Dailey Fitness Center, at the top of the key, her face fronts the ballhandler’s sternum, and her arms reach way out and flail as if a baby was falling in her direction.
The whole act eats up a lot of floor space, and when the opponent opts for a fall-away jumper, Ellibee rears up like a pin oak. The loopy shot goes in anyway, but not because she backed down.
People have asked her if she doesn’t wish she was playing Division I women’s basketball today, when teams travel by air, marquee games are televised and the season ends in a celebrated, 68-team tournament.
“I played when I got to play,” she says, with the kind of smile native to playgrounds at recess.
Today, at 6 feet 1 inch, she would play point guard, she insists — such is the evolution of university athletics. She was an unrecruited walk-on, too, which is increasingly rare. Then, players had to buy practice uniforms, and traveling by unheated bus to Manhattan, Kan., or Boulder, Colo., meant she had to layer her socks. “But it made for good memories.”
Halfway through her senior season, she grabbed a rebound and turned to fire an outlet pass, and her left knee ripped. She could actually hear it, and with it, the bell tolling on her basketball career. But it was the ultimate test of something her coach had been working on with her. “For the first eight hours” she cried, and catastrophized, because “Coach taught us, ‘You have your eight hours of depression.’
“You get over it, and you figure out what you’re going to do next. You continue down that path of, for basketball players, advancing your skill, advancing your practice, and that’s what I did” — but for the rest of her life.
Call it a setbacks stopwatch. It has helped set the tone of her tenure as Pulaski Technical College president the last three years. In spring 2014, the college went to voters with a proposed 1.9-mill tax increase — functionally a 3 percent raise over the existing county millage — and it got trounced, 3-to-1. Just before that, Ellibee was given a vote of “no confidence” by the student government after her decision to fire an instructor (nothing more came of that). This year, the college saw enrollment drop again, and it raised tuition 16 percent.
When Ellibee took the reins, the state’s largest community college was at nearly 12,000 students, about the same as it was the year before. By fall 2014, it had 9,236. This semester, it’s roughly 7,700.
Ellibee doesn’t like this — gauging enrollment like a speedometer of her school’s momentum. For one thing, factors outside the quality of programs and professors affect student body size: Enrollment rose everywhere after the recession because so many who were out of work returned to school for retraining or reinvention. For another, swollen enrollment often tracks with loan defaults. The federal Department of Education and accreditation agencies begin investigating institutions whose defaults surpass 30 percent, and Pulaski Tech was close.
“We wanted students to complete, not just enter, Pulaski Tech,” says board chairman Ronnie Dedman, and Ellibee’s vision — one she made clear in interviews before she was selected (unanimously) by the board in 2012 — “is exactly what we were looking for.”
In the last three years, a testing standard has been introduced for incoming students (at the state’s direction), and Ellibee and her team have focused on developmental instruction (think adult education) and academic counseling. Many of the changes aim to make Pulaski Tech a better school, but many others attempt to shape the student body into better students.
“So, you need access,” Ellibee says, “but it’s access as well as success.”
HISTORY
Ellibee was born to a pair of successes — a salesman who rose to the rank of vice president within his company, and a nurse who became the state nursing director in Wisconsin.
As a girl she’d dress in her Sunday best and accompany her mom to the Capitol once a year. Elaine Ellibee knew state legislators and agency directors, and Margaret got to watch her in action.
At the same time, she dreamed of becoming a jockey, a little admiral in silks with a crop atop a thoroughbred, and when Dad pointed out, gently, that jockeys are uniformly small while she was the tallest girl in the entire school, she rolled with it. “It is what it is,” she might have said then, if she’d known the expression. (Today, it’s burnished onto a wooden paperweight that sits upon her desk.)
She wasn’t precocious, didn’t skip a grade or win national science fairs, but neither was she unserious. In her family “there was a tremendous amount of love, and lots of humor, and the ability to gig one another,” but “my folks were disciplinarians,” too. They expected her best, and that meant something more than her best try.
Where other college-bound students might have busied themselves with test preparation or language clubs, Ellibee was interested in farming. She took agriculture classes all four years of high school and joined Future Farmers of America. She picked Iowa State University for its agricultural education department. Walking onto the basketball team — Iowa State was not an elite basketball program in the Big 8 then — didn’t factor in. She swears.
Summers away from Ames, Iowa, she was a park ranger at Greers Ferry. (Her parents had retired to Heber Springs.)
The turning point of her life, she says, well, there are two, but the first was her hiring by Stuttgart’s school district to be the high school ag teacher. “Here you’ve got this girl who’d taken swine production, beef production, and I go to … the rice capital of the world” where for seven out of eight periods each day she taught welding, small-engine repair and horticulture.
Welding?
“I can run a T weld and a butt weld with the best of them.”
After a few years she again wished to pursue her own education, and thus began an odyssey of epic proportions, first to Fayetteville in 1986 for a master’s degree, then to Iowa, where she was a state consultant for agriculture education, then to Madison, Wis., for a doctorate, after which she was recruited by the Oklahoma department of education. In 2002, she went back to Wisconsin, where she was the state’s director of career and technical education for secondary education.
In 2007, a graduate school pal enticed her to fill a vice presidency at Waukesha County Technical College outside Milwaukee. The community college was big — 28,000 — and the newly created slot in the executive team, “vice president of strategic effectiveness,” oversaw the college’s five-year plan, its grant applications and accreditation plan. It was a splendid springboard to a presidency.
“She was president material,” says Barbara Prindiville, the grad school pal and Waukesha County Technical College president. “All along, Margaret was a leader, and she’s an orator. My God, one of the best speakers I’ve come across in my career.”
That’s where she was when, in 2012, with her mom in failing health in North Little Rock, Ellibee threw her name in to lead Arkansas’ largest community college just across town. Trustee MaryJane Rebick led the search committee.
“She had a friendly manner. She wasn’t stiff. She just seemed like a real person,” and when she arrived and quickly raised the bar for admission to the college, she also “engaged our student population. People know who she is. She doesn’t hide in her office. … She’s out there with the students every day.
“In the worst case, if it wasn’t for Margaret, our student population would drop even more. Instead, they do feel like they have a home at Pulaski Tech.”
PHILOSOPHY
The teaching gig in Stuttgart was her first big turning point. The second was meeting Sue Ball in Madison in 1999. (Ball is today an adjunct professor in the kinesiology and physical education department at the University of Central Arkansas in Conway.) The two share a love of exercise, the affection of three dogs and a summer cottage in Empire, Mich.
“Although we didn’t find each other until we were a bit older, it’s very evident if you spend any time with us, it’s just one of those things; we’re meant to be,” Ball says.
The two married on May 15, 2014, in Dubuque, Iowa, in front of family.
“It was very emotional, for our families and for us. People always ask, ‘Do you feel differently being married?’ And I think the answer is absolutely,” Ball says. “Although our families always felt we were wed before, it’s real now. We have the same rights as everyone else, and as we age, that becomes increasingly important.”
With little urging, Ellibee extemporizes on the value of education. Not a degree. Not the compounded return of a college diploma over a career, but the value of learning. Next year she plans to take a theology course at Christ Episcopal Church called Education for Ministry. Her maternal grandfather and great-grandfather were United Church of Christ ministers. Anyway, “it’s an aspect that helps you evolve as a person.”
“If you look at the skills a good education gives you … the ability to have an open mind and continue to learn. If you have that, you can go anyplace. The ability to be confident in what you do — not cocky, but confident. The ability to know you’re not going to have all the answers, but you’re going to seek out the answers.”
Right now the president and her lieutenants are seeking the answers to funding shortfalls and declining enrollment, but a public community college isn’t a for-profit volume play. Graduation rates, course retention rates and student loan defaults are factors in measuring success, and a few years ago the college was admitting folks who could not read and were applying for low-interest school loans “to make their truck payment, go to class for a little while, but then that’s all we’d see of them,” college provost Mike DeLong said.
Zach Perrine, interim dean of enrollment services, says this is Ellibee’s and the school’s big plan: coordinating academic departments with advisers, students and faculty to make sure students hit their mark, every mark, going forward.
About the failed millage, Ellibee says, as president of the college, successes and setbacks are hers to bear, but even levies for highway improvements are hard sells these days. “We are in a climate, and I’m not saying it’s bad or good, but a political climate that’s very anti-tax. With that, there are consequences. It gets back to ‘it is what it is.’”
Earlier this month Gov. Asa Hutchinson met with higher education chiefs in the state and said changes needed to be made to state funding, and he didn’t mean cuts. His Higher Education Department Director Brett Powell said he’d like to move state aid from “enrollment-based funding” to “outcomes, what institutions are able to achieve.” The state ranks dead last nationally in degree attainment, and Hutchinson pointed specifically to the goal of raising achievement among minority groups and working adults.
Pulaski Technical College doesn’t award four-year diplomas, but it does turn out technical degrees, and it is a gateway school for bachelor’s degrees. The average age of its students is roughly 30, but among these, there are technical degree seekers and “transfers” — students who will go on to get a bachelor’s degree, maybe in the arts or social sciences, elsewhere.
Ellibee, the old ag teacher who can weld and talk small engine repair, and Ellibee the lifelong learner who went back to school for her master’s and back again for a doctorate, can play at both ends of that court. Her last season as a Cyclone, Ellibee earned the school’s Ralph Olsen Award, a team vote for the squad’s outstanding contributor.
If “it is what it is” is what she tells herself, outstanding contribution is what others get from her.