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| S C T E CHN I CA L CO L L E G E S Y S T EM ’ S
F I R S T 5 0 Y EAR S
The 1990s
A H I G H E R R O L E I N E D U C A T I O N
ment, infrastructure expansion, and certificates and degrees of-
fered. He “talked the talk and walked the walk” and in Hudgins,
he saw a leader.
Hudgins, like previous system directors, benefited from the
wisdom and experience of the “boy presidents.” These veterans
had seen the system sprout from a seed into a mighty oak. System
stalwarts, when the “boy presidents” talked, people listened.
Hudgins allowed his name to be put into nomination and
accepted the job. “Being the system president never is as much
fun as being president of a college,” he said. “That’s where the
students are and that’s where the action is, but the system office
does very important work, and you notice I’m using the words
‘system office.’ Until I became the executive director, it was the
state office. It was a pejorative term I used frequently as a pres-
ident because I, as a lot of presidents do, asked what’s the need
for the system office? All we do is give them reports, and they’re
getting in the way slowing things down. So, I said, ‘If I’m going
to do this job I need to think of all the things I’ve said and see if
I can improve it as a president moving into that job’—and I did
my best to do that.”
Hudgins enjoyed working with the presidents, though “it was
like herding cats.” Some of those cats would soon turn over the
reins to new presidents. For a long time there had been no need
to fret over their succession. The day was approaching, when that
would change.
THE “BOY PRESIDENT” ERA CLOSES
In 1999, Dr. Barry Russell succeeded Dr. Hudgins as Midlands
Technical College’s president. That meant attending presidents’
meetings. Russell remembers one presidents’ meeting in partic-
ular. “Somebody said, ‘Look around the table. In just a few years
half of you sitting around this table are going to retire.’”
Dr. Lex Walters, heading up Piedmont Tech at 30 years old,
was the youngest of the “boy presidents.” System leaders wanted
people who were energetic, hardworking, and dedicated to serv-
ing others. A beneficial domino effect of sorts took hold. Wal-
ter, for instance, brought in people like Dr. Jim Hudgins and Dr.
Barry Russell, who, after learning the “ropes” at Piedmont, went
on to become presidents and later to assume the role of South
Carolina system president. And now retirement was arriving for
some.
“And it dawned on all of us,” said Russell, “that this is going
to change the system. The ‘boy presidents’ who started this sys-
tem—on whose backs these colleges were built—were all going
to be retiring. And we decided this could be bad news, or we
could take the positive view and say, ‘Well, here’s an opportunity
to bring in new leadership and new ideas, but either way we go,
the system will be forever changed when the first wave of presi-
dents have all retired.’”
“The other thing we saw,” said Russell, “was that we were go-
ing to get folks from out of state, from other systems, and while
we shared similarities with many systems, there was a unique-
ness and a history we didn’t want to lose.”
Russell and his colleagues wanted new ideas, but it had to be
within reason. “We didn’t want them to come and try to turn
things upside down just because they didn’t understand what
we were. So we put together an orientation program that we
required all new presidents to participate in. We put together a
manual that covered important information about the system.”
The specter of change led to conscious thought. Hudgins
suggested creating leadership development programs to identify
people in the system with the potential and interest in getting
into senior leadership positions in their colleges and perhaps be-
coming president.
System leaders wanted the new presidents to understand the
governance structure and to know a bit about the system his-
tory and programs run through the state board. “That helped,”
said Russell. “It’s nice to have folks come in and say ‘You know,
we did it a little differently back in Ohio or back in Florida’, as
