Round Rock Edition | November 2023

Education

BY CHLOE YOUNG

The Austin Community College District has 11 campuses in the Austin area.

COURTESY AUSTIN COMMUNITY COLLEGE

Get to know Russell Lowery-Hart, ACC’s new chancellor Russell Lowery-Hart began as the new chancellor for the Austin Community College District on Oct. 1 after serving as the president of Amarillo College since 2014. His hiring follows the retirement of former ACC Chancellor Richard Rhodes this year. What inspired you to work in higher education? I think I grew up in a family that was challenging, and some would say dysfunctional, and education was always my safe place. Teachers were always the places of encouragement and support. So I’ve always been drawn to education because of its own impact to me, and I’ve enjoyed the space of education for that reason. What led you to pursue this position at Austin Community College? I’ve always been impressed by and encouraged by the innovation that happens in Austin and that it’s a place that embraces a willingness to try new things. When I heard that Richard Rhodes was retiring, someone that I’ve admired and been friends with for a long time, it’s the only place that I thought had the resources and the talent and the board leadership to be a place of transforma- tion. ... I feel like ACC can be a place that can not

just transform our region, but transform higher education across the country, and I wanted to be a part of it. How would you describe your approach to leadership? My leadership is based on care and love—that we are committed to loving our students to success, and that means we have to listen to them, know them, respond to them and engage them in helping us redesign ourselves for their needs. What are some of your priorities for the ACC District? My rst 100 days are built for us to intentionally listen and understand the student experience and the employee experience. Once we have an understanding of how our students receive us and how we as employees engage our students, at the end of that 100 days, I hope that we can identify a clear, big, audacious goal around completion rates or graduation rates; that we will have a clear theory of change that organizes the entire district around how we get to that goal; and that we have deployed data to predict when and how our students need us. Are there any programs you’d like to start or expand? I think what I worry about is that the way our society is changing at such a dramatic rate around issues of AI and automation and robotics and bio- science that we don’t have programmatic responses to those things yet. We have to prepare ourselves and prepare our existing programs to respond to

how these things start impacting the way we live and the way we work. ACC has not raised tuition in 10 years and kept its tax rate low. Is this something you plan to continue? Completely. I think what makes ACC so powerful and an important partner in the region is that we don’t overtax our students or our taxpayers. We’re keeping it aordable while having the most innovative, exciting and important technologies. Our students can come into our spaces and access points of learning that they might not ever see in even some of our country’s nest universities as freshmen and sophomores in college, and for us to be able to do that, by keeping taxes and tuition low, says a lot about our scal responsibility. What advice would you give to yourself in college? It would be to trust myself. I just remember questioning myself and the level of insecurity I had about who I was, and if I was on the right path. I would have just told myself to walk in trust and to not be in a hurry to grow up. The process is always more interesting and important to our personal development than the end result.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. For a longer version, visit communityimpact.com.

ROUND ROCK EDITION