Photo by Sarah Walor
At age 66, after completing a decade and a half as president of J. Sargeant Reynolds Community College, Gary Rhodes is leaving with an unrealized ambition. In his mind, he sees a sea of football fields — not populated by players and pom-poms, but by paintings.
“We now have 5.7 football fields with art, and I have 39 football fields of art yet to acquire,” Rhodes says.
When Rhodes says football fields, he means wall space. He knows exactly how much wall space has been filled with artwork, after commissioning the college’s facilities department to measure the available wall space on the two-year college’s three campuses: downtown Richmond, Parham Road and Goochland County.
Rhodes is aware that he likely won’t find all the art he wants by the time his presidency ends on Sept. 1, and Paula P. Pando takes the reins as Reynolds’ fourth president. (Pando comes to the Richmond area from Atlantic Heights, New Jersey, where she is senior vice president for student and educational services at Hudson County Community College.) But he has been urging donors to keep contributing. Rhodes believes that art can be inspiring, making a routine space into a special one. He started building Reynolds’ art collection five or six years ago, asking businesses if they would adopt a space on the campus. As with art, Rhodes says, people tend to underestimate the power of community colleges.
“People don’t know about us,” he says. “That’s still my biggest challenge. My aspirational goal is that they appreciate us; my challenge is that they don’t understand us.”
Rhodes says his finest discovery, confirmed by the locally based Southeastern Institute of Research, is that one out of four workers in the Richmond region attended Reynolds, and one out of three health care workers did. He says he now puts the finding at the bottom of almost every email.
“Someone working two jobs, trying to raise a child — we’ve made a big difference in their lives.”
The data point, Rhodes explains, does not mean that everyone who ever attended Reynolds received a degree.
“It means they started or took something here — maybe one class,” he says. “But it’s still huge.” One of the things Rhodes will miss the most about his job is hearing personal stories. “Someone working two jobs, trying to raise a child — we’ve made a big difference in their lives.”
Rhodes has never been a shrinking violet when making a point, or making an impression. He rode into Richmond 16 years ago on a Harley-Davidson. Midway into his tenure as president, he grew a goatee and began wearing a bow tie. He’s kept the tie and goatee but has given up his motorcycle, because he’s seen too many motorists texting on the highways.
“Even if it’s a Mini Cooper and a motorcycle, the motorcycle loses,” Rhodes says. He now prefers kayaking.
Rhodes was the first college president hired by Glenn DuBois, chancellor of the Virginia Community College System, and DuBois says he brought energy to Reynolds, the system’s third largest institution. Rhodes, DuBois adds, was tireless in reaching out to the community, serving on numerous boards and as the chairman of ChamberRVA. “I had to tell him to cut back,” DuBois recalls with a laugh.
Rhodes says his wife, Nam, had been after him to retire for three or four years, and he decided to take her advice while he’s still healthy and active. The two will make their new home near Hilton Head, South Carolina, but Rhodes will maintain a connection to higher education by teaching an online course at Reynolds on leadership development and a doctoral course for Old Dominion University on community college leadership. He also will be working on a book detailing how to be a good community college president: “Relationships, relationships, relationships,” he says.
One of the oddities about community colleges that Rhodes often has to explain is that when the economy is good and people are working, enrollment declines. Reynolds now has about 16,000 students, down from 20,000 during the height of the recent recession.
Rhodes likens his role as a community college president to being a symphony conductor, and he likes to share the credit for successful programs.
Besides building Reynolds’ art collection, he sees one of the most significant new programs during his presidency as something conceived of by his executive vice president, Genene LeRosen: to create advanced college academies for high school students. Under the program, students apply as they would for a governor’s school, and a cohort of about 35 students stay together through all four years of high school. They take high school courses their first two years, then, during their junior and senior years, they take all community college classes at their high schools.
“They literally graduate with a two-year associate degree about two weeks before they get their high school diploma,”Rhodes says.
The program has been implemented in Henrico, Goochland, Hanover and Powhatan counties, and a hybrid version is used in the Richmond schools.
Although Rhodes won’t be president when it’s completed, the new Culinary Institute at Reynolds is taking shape in Church Hill. Rhodes praises Steven Markel, vice chairman of the Henrico-based Markel Corp., a specialty insurer, with proposing the idea and putting money behind it. Reynolds officials and community partners say the institute will benefit the neighborhood and provide new opportunities for residents.
Rhodes says he hopes to be remembered as someone who was passionate about his work, who listened to others and who fought to bring the best ideas to the table. Another thing the outgoing Reynolds president is known for is his fondness for inspirational sayings. Among his favorites:
“Anything worth doing is worth doing well,” he says. “Let’s only make promises we can keep. We don’t care how much you know until we know how much you care.”
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