One year in: What this year has taught me

On October 1, 2025, I became President and CEO of the American Association of Community Colleges (AACC). A year has passed — full, humbling, clarifying — and I find myself wanting to mark it not with a list of accomplishments, but with what stayed with me. This year, I learned.

What I’ve learned

I learned that community colleges remain the most resilient sector in higher education. They adapt. They stretch. They transform and evolve, often with fewer resources and far less recognition than the moment demands. They meet students before circumstance has had the chance to filter out their talent. They recognize that wasting human potential is not simply unfortunate; it is a national failure. In today’s world, it is a national security risk. Community colleges end the cycles that would otherwise annul so much potential. They build learners into workforce participants and citizens. They protect communities. I believed this a year ago. Having watched it on campus after campus across this nation, and I believe it even more deeply now.

I learned that it matters to this field that I show up — in person, in writing, in the quality of my attention. And I learned, again, what I thought I already knew: that listening is a far more powerful instrument of leadership than speaking. I have spent more of this year with my ears open than my mouth, and the work — and the people who trust me with it — are better for that choice.

I learned that leadership means naming the hard things plainly and amplifying the opportunity that is sitting in plain sight, unclaimed. “Resilient by Design” named what was straining our colleges. “Strategic Compass 2035” named where we intend to go, and “Reimagining Leadership for a New Era” named what this decade will require of the people who lead. Each was an exercise in sensemaking — helping a field see clearly what is actually happening to it — and sense-giving — helping that same field believe it can act on what it sees. I am convinced, more than I was a year ago, that sense-making and sense-giving are not soft skills. They are the leadership competencies this decade demands of anyone who intends to lead well.

I learned that grace and discernment are, in equal measure, what defines good leadership and what makes it hard. Translating a vision into an operating structure, building capacity where there was none, building a team that trusts itself and trusts me — none of it moves at the speed of conviction. It moves at the speed of grace, extended and received, and discernment, exercised again and again, in rooms no one else sees.

I learned that history is a mighty teacher, and that our sector should never ask permission for a mission that already belongs to us. Community colleges are indelibly linked to the best parts of the communities they serve, because we abide in them — with dignity, not as visitors passing through. The idea that higher education should be a universal, publicly supported pathway to economic mobility, civic engagement and national strength is not a new ambition we are chasing. It is our inheritance, handed to us by the Truman Commission nearly 80 years ago. We do not need permission to claim it. We need the discipline to live up to it.

I learned that patience is still one of my life’s ongoing lessons — and I also saw real growth in myself this year, in exactly the places I have long needed it.

I learned that self-care cannot be optional. Doing it well doesn’t only serve me — it liberates the people with whom I work and lead.

And I learned that joy and laughter are the true elixirs of life. When you work for people you deeply respect and feel connected to — my board, our members, my team and this entire higher education community — you have room. Room to stretch, to learn, to make mistakes, and to lead in ways that are honorable and impactful.

What I’ve led

This belief became structure in July, when we implemented a new Executive Leadership Team — an enterprise leadership model built around senior vice presidents accountable for distinct strategic portfolios, a chief strategy and impact officer and a chief of staff and strategic operations, and four new positions to expand our capacity for members. It wasn’t reorganization for its own sake. It was infrastructure for everything else named above.

I led the development and launch of “Strategic Compass 2035,” our decade-long navigation system, grounded in “Resilient by Design” and anchored to a theory of change to which I return often: AACC leads as Catalyst, Convener and Community — sparking what the field needs before it is asked for, bringing the right people into the same room, and strengthening the civic fabric our colleges hold together.

This year also renewed our focus on leadership and professional learning. The findings from “Reimagining Leadership for a New Era” shaped how we showed up for the field in real time. “Leading Through the Noise,” a special edition of the AACC John E. Roueche Future Leaders Institute and the AACC Walter G. Bumphus Future Presidents Institute, was built around what presidents told us they needed, not what we assumed. That work is converging into a new framework for AACC’s leadership development suite, which we’ll be unveiling soon.

What’s next

None of this was ever meant to end with a strategic plan on a shelf. Here is where it’s going.

• Truman@80 — a 28-month national inquiry, beginning this fall, marking the 80th anniversary of the Truman Commission’s 1947 report — the very inheritance I described above.
• “Leading Together,” a governance convening for CEOs and board chairs, focused on naming clearly how our current environment is affecting governance at the institutional level, determining how AACC can better support presidents and boards in navigating it, and giving AACC direct guidance on how we should be strengthening leadership capacity across the association in the years ahead, will hold its first session in January 2027 in San Diego.
• A new AACC leadership development and professional learning framework, built from this year’s formation work and unveiling soon.
• Under Strategic Compass 2035, the infrastructure standing up behind all of it: a Community College Futures Lab, a National Foresight & Strategy Institute and a National Talent Alignment Council — each one built so this field never again has to ask permission for the mission that already belongs to it.

Thank you

A year in, I am more convinced than ever that our best days are not behind us — they are being designed right now, deliberately, by the people in this field who show up for their students every day. I am grateful for the trust this community has placed in me, for the staff who are building this association’s capacity to meet the moment, and for every president, trustee and partner who has opened a door, invited me onto a campus or engaged in a hard conversation with me this year.

Thank you for a phenomenal first year as president and CEO of AACC — let’s go to work.

The post One year in: What this year has taught me first appeared on Community College Daily.