Alex Johnson settled on a career in education as a teen. He didn’t like living in New York City, where his X-ray technician mother and carpenter-painter-plumber father had moved the family from small-town Concord, North Carolina, to search for better jobs. But he loved attending public schools in the city’s Harlem neighborhood. They were far more progressive than the ones he’d attended back home, places staffed with dynamic instructors who taught ceramics as well as shop classes. His 11th-grade biology teacher at Charles Evans Hughes High School was particularly impressive.
“He brought me from the middle of the pack to the top of the pack just by the way he talked,” the 66-year-old president of Cuyahoga Community College remembers. “He motivated you to want to learn. He talked about things that were pertinent to us and how we could apply [them] within our own settings. I said, ‘This is what I want to do.’”
Johnson’s passion for education has propelled him up the college-administration ladder to his present top rung. When he was installed in his post three years ago, almost a decade after he departed Tri-C as head of its Metro Campus, he listed five objectives: strengthening a focus on student completion; working more closely with employers to ensure students earn degrees with labor-market value; adapting to changing media to tell Tri-C’s story in effective and innovative ways; prioritizing resources for the benefit of students to promote affordability; and continued nurturing of collaboration and engagement with the community. He rattles off numbers that indicate those goals are being realized. Graduation numbers are up 150 percent over the last three years. Certificate programs have increased 400 percent over the same period. And the school’s image boasts “an almost 90 percent favorable approval rating.” It’s all what he calls “a dream come true.”
“I never had any idea that my hope to become a teacher would manifest itself in this way,” he marvels.
Blazing such a career path would have seemed unlikely for a black child living in Concord during the early 1950s — the town, like most of the South, was segregated. Johnson remembers a time and place where blacks had to pack their own groceries in brown bags they brought to the local food center and watch movies from the balcony of one of the town’s two theaters. (The other one admitted only whites.) Yet he describes the situation without a trace of bitterness or resentment in his voice.
“We had church, we had our own library, we had our own swimming pool, we had our own schools, we had our own stores, we had our own restaurants — small dives, in some instances,” he explains. “I’m not suggesting to you by any stretch of the imagination we should go back to that. I’m just saying that I did not miss being a part of a larger community because I had a community.”
Johnson grew tired of life in the Big Apple (“It was too grimy, it was too big.”) and returned to Concord to move in with his maternal grandparents and complete his senior year of high school. His grades and athletic ability were good enough to play football as a walk-on at Winston-Salem State University, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education in 1971. Ironically, he returned to New York City right after graduation for the same reason his parents moved there: The job he accepted — in his case, as a teacher at a Brooklyn elementary — paid thousands more than he’d earn at home. To cover the bills until school started, he worked as a substitute teacher at a publicly funded early childhood center in the Bronx — a place he liked so much that he spent the next four years there rather than ultimately taking the Brooklyn job.
“I loved being with little kids,” he enthuses. “They depended on you, you know what I’m saying? They looked up to you for guidance and support and answers.” It was a more appealing group, he decided, than the fifth-graders he’d supervised as a student teacher.
Johnson taught 4- and 5-year-olds for two years, then spent two years in administrative roles, at the same time earning a master’s degree in early childhood education from Lehman College. A professor who taught him to work with young children more effectively inspired him to follow in her footsteps. After completing work on a doctorate in early childhood and special education at Pennsylvania State University in 1978, he accepted an assistant professorship at Bowling Green State University, a position that put him and wife Daphne closer to her parents in Youngstown. Three years later, Winston-Salem State called to offer him an associate professorship.
Over the next dozen years, Johnson advanced first to professor, then to assistant vice president for academic affairs and vice president for academic affairs — positions that took him out of the classroom but, he discovered, allowed him to help more students. “I love what education can do, not only for the individual but for a community and nation,” he explains. In 1993, then-Kent State University president Carol Cartwright, who had been Johnson’s adviser at Penn State, called and asked if he’d consider working at a community college. Her friend Jerry Sue Thornton, Tri-C’s new president, was looking for a Metro Campus president.
“I said, ‘OK, I’ll give it a try,” Johnson recalls.
Johnson found an urban campus that “needed to make sure that its programs and services supported the needs of students” — individuals from diverse backgrounds who often weren’t ready for college, even though they had a high school diploma, and more likely to drop out. Under his direction the campus began working to ensure Cleveland Metropolitan School District students were prepared for the experience by implementing a Dominion-funded Math Teacher Development Program, which improved math curricula by providing in-service training for instructors, and establishing the High-Tech Academy, a program that put high-schoolers in college classes for half their school days and computer labs in district buildings, along with some public housing developments. He also came up with a Healthy Neighborhood Partnership in which nursing students ventured into the community to do various screenings and refer individuals to local healthcare organizations.
“We needed to have a strategic approach to promoting learning, but also a strategic approach to community engagement,” he explains.
In 2004, Delgado Community College in New Orleans lured Johnson away with the opportunity to become chancellor. While Metro Campus enrollment had grown from 4,500 to 6,000-plus during his tenure, Delgado had 17,500 students on three campuses — the largest and oldest community college in Louisiana.
A year-and-a-half later, in August 2005, Hurricane Katrina struck.
Johnson recalls that 40 percent of Delgado’s buildings were destroyed or damaged. He spent the first month running the college from Baton Rouge, the state capital. “I had to assemble a small team of individuals that had, in some instances, no administrative or leadership experience at all,” he says. But the school reopened with a target-number 10,000 students six months later, in part by doing its own remediation and hiring its own inspectors to certify that structures met building codes.
“It taught me a lot about how to lead during a difficult moment,” he says. “The important thing is never think about tomorrow. Have a plan, but think about the intricacies of the plan to the extent that you only accomplish what you can within a day’s time.”
In 2008, Johnson arrived at Community College of Allegheny County, a Pittsburgh-area institution similar in size to Delgado, to become its president. The job brought he and his wife closer to their two adult children and first grandchild in Cleveland. During his tenure, the school expanded workforce offerings, particularly in the natural-gas sector, and established its first-ever capital campaign, which raised almost $45 million instead of the $30 million goal. He returned to Tri-C five years later to be even closer to family — and head a community college with a student body that had grown to 26,000.
“There was a greater focus on getting students into the institution and getting them graduated,” he remembers. “There was a commitment to engaging the faculty and staff in promoting the direction of the institution. There was an emphasis on securing the finances needed to strengthen programs and facilities … I came back to an institution where [once] there were hardly any new buildings to
one that had completed
several.”
At the top of the new president’s to-do list was addressing the nursing program’s accreditation crisis. It involved securing an extension from the Accreditation Commission for Education in Nursing, primarily to increase the number of part-time clinical instructors with master’s degrees to the required 50 percent of all such faculty.
“We went through a reaccreditation process,” he says. “It normally takes two years; in this particular instance, it took six months. We passed it with flying colors.”
At the same time, Johnson began fulfilling his aforementioned goals. He “reprioritized” $10 million of the budget, devoting half of it to jump-starting student-success initiatives. The role of the community liaison on each campus was modified to include more outreach — establishing bureaus of faculty members to speak at local events, for example. Relationships with 200 organizations like El Barrio, Esperanza and Boys and Girls Clubs of Cleveland were strengthened by developing education-promoting, on-campus youth camps for their members.
He plans to use the next four years to tackle projects such as expanding the first-year-experience program beyond a first-semester orientation class to include a second-semester course and more on-campus summer internships; opening humanities and logistics-and-transportation “centers of excellence;” and improving existing facilities, some of which are 50 years old.
“There’s so much that we have to do between now and the time I even think about retiring,” he says.