Longtime chancellor looks back
McKay retiring after two decades of leading ASU-Beebe
BEEBE — At 74, the outgoing chancellor of Arkansas State University-Beebe has a lot of stories.
One’s of being born in a log cabin in the back 40 outside Amagon, a northeast Arkansas hamlet where former Gov. Mike Beebe was also born. One’s of chopping cotton at a young age — “child labor,” he now calls it. One’s of how he was a C-plus student not even dreaming of college, but met with a recruiter anyway “to get out of class.”
He didn’t have money for tuition, but then came an opportunity. And he didn’t shy away.
Eugene McKay will say that higher education changed his life. His friends and colleagues will say it affected his decisions leading the 3,969-student campus for more than 20 years, a post he’s leaving Jan. 15 for retirement.
“I liked the work,” he said, explaining what’s kept him going. “Of course, I grew up on the farm, and all I ever know you gotta do was work. I really enjoy working, but I’m 74. I’m going to have to retire sometime.”
McKay won’t just credit his endurance to the work or his ongoing education.
His voice perks up the most, his eyes get that little spark and his usual chortle almost turns into a boyish laugh when he explains what — or who, really — was his rock throughout the years,
the best of his memories: his late wife of 47 years, Judy.
To fully understand McKay, though, requires a little rewinding.
GROWING UP
Born to a couple of farmers, McKay grew up chopping cotton and could do a man’s work by age 10.
The line of work also meant that the family moved around a bit, but it usually wasn’t too far — from the Amagon area just a few miles from the Cache River, to Weona about 30 miles east, or some 10 miles past Harrisburg. And west to Charlotte, then south to Bradford.
Growing up, McKay didn’t really care for school. He failed the fourth grade but later made up for it by skipping the seventh grade.
One day in high school, he arrived home to find his house ablaze.
“Just as I came home, I saw the roof fall in,” he had dictated to his wife, who later wrote a biography for him. “I will never forget that my senior class paid for my senior ring by collecting pennies and giving me a whole bucket of them.”
Nevertheless, McKay graduated in a class of 30 from Bradford High School and started attending Arkansas College, or what’s now Lyon College, in Batesville. Remember that recruiter? Well, she provided a $200 loan for McKay and workstudy options to help him pay for tuition.
He chose to major in English because it was his easiest high school class. The French minor? His adviser told him that everyone was taking it and that he should, too.
The French paid off. It led McKay to his first job, teaching in Alton, Mo., in 1964.
Maybe fate had begun spinning its web for McKay. He first met Judy in that school.
“Actually, I probably shouldn’t tell this,” McKay started. “But she was actually in my French class three days and decided I was too hard. She was going to be the valedictorian. She wasn’t going to take any chances. So she dropped it, and then of course, it was after she graduated before we started dating.”
The Alton superintendent soon after moved to the twoyear Arkansas State College branch at Beebe and in 1966 tried to lure McKay there to teach, as well. To get the job, though, McKay needed some graduate coursework.
So he enrolled at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville to earn a master’s degree. He had to take a day off — June 11, 1966 — to get married.
“And I’ve been a real stickler for attendance since then,” he said.
As he likes to tell it, Judy was set on becoming an accountant, but he persuaded her to pursue English. It wasn’t a hard sell — she reportedly read all of the books in the Alton public library before she graduated high school. And it was one of those things that they did together.
“We read a lot of boring books that nobody would read but us,” he said. “I read until I couldn’t see, and my new wife read to me then.”
He liked novels and poetry. He can still even recite a few by heart. What he doesn’t remember, he’ll blame on his nearly three decades out of the classroom.
McKay earned his master’s degree in three years, and Judy followed in his footsteps. She taught at Cabot High School before the two decided to go for the gold. ASU-Beebe had guaranteed McKay’s teaching job if he left to earn a doctorate degree in English, he said.
“I was going along, and my wife, she encouraged me,” he said. “She was the one that pushed me to get more education all the time.”
CAMPUS WORK
The family — with a son, Shaun — returned to Beebe in 1974. After having two more boys — Kevin in 1979 and Robert in 1982 — Judy went to work for the community college, too. She taught there for 26 years.
McKay’s first steps in administration came in 1987, when he became vice chancellor for academic affairs, creating the school’s 43-hour general education core curriculum.
He stayed on for seven years until Chancellor Bill Owen died. McKay then stepped into a leadership role again.
And the ASU System board kept him on.
McKay brought Newport in as a Beebe branch campus, then helped it become a stand-alone school. He also took in a Searcy campus and built from the ground up a $16 million Heber Springs campus with the help of a sales tax.
In 1996, the school started a John Deere Agriculture Equipment Technology program. Aging mechanics were close to retiring, so the company created programs to train younger students to fill the job need, said Shawn Taillon, the department head at Beebe.
Students need a John Deere dealership to sponsor them throughout the program, which involves two semesters of coursework and two internships. The company provides the tractors on which the students work.
The two-year program gives students an associate’s degree and has grown to become the largest in North America, said Taillon, who also went through the program. The one in Beebe has a job placement rate upon graduation of more than 95 percent, he said.
“When I came through as a student, I had eight classmates plus myself,” Taillon said. “That was the typical size class. Last year’s class that graduated had 28. This year has 30. Next year, 42. The program has grown so much since 2008.”
On a recent visit, McKay said none of the tractors were like the Model B he had growing up, and he claimed he didn’t know how to work the newest line of tractors. (But he recently bought a newer model for his garden.)
“It was two rows,” McKay said of his Model B. “You know, some of these combines have eight, 10, 12 rows at a time. I mean, some of them are big. A two-row tractor, you know, they’d call it a toy today, a garden tractor.”
McKay gave ASU System President Chuck Welch a start in higher education administration in 2003. Welch replaced a longtime vice chancellor for academics.
“It was a really progressive move both for him and the institution,” Welch said. “I was 30 years old, young and a very different profile than perhaps what the campus was accustomed to. It was a bold statement.”
After nearly a year and a half, Welch was favored to lead the University of Arkansas Community College at Hope. He struggled with the possibility of leaving his first shot at administration and taking a new opportunity.
“I think there was sort of an expectation that I would ultimately be his replacement when he retired,” Welch said of McKay.
Welch said that when he saw McKay after deciding to take the chancellor’s post at Hope, “he looked at me and said, ‘ You know, Chuck, I don’t want you to go. I have high hopes for you. At the same time, you’re 31 years old, and these opportunities don’t come up every day.’ He could not be kinder and more understanding about it.”
And when Welch’s name was the most buzzed about for the ASU System president’s position — he hadn’t yet applied — McKay pulled Welch into a corner at a meeting.
“And he said, ‘ Well, I just want you know, I’ve already called some of the trustees and said they need to make this happen,’” Welch said. “From Day One, he has just been the perfect chancellor.”
McKay has always been and will always be student-centered, his friends said. The chancellor’s first question before any change is how will it affect the students, said Joe Berry, his executive assistant for the past four years and a former ASU-Beebe student.
“And as long as there’s a breath in his body, we will be an open-door institution,” he said. “While a lot of schools are setting admissions standards, he won’t do it. He says that every student and every person deserves a chance, and he will give them that chance.”
As a chancellor, McKay was hardly like “the great Oz behind the curtain,” Berry said.
“He was so down to earth and so personable and so humble and so meek,” he said. “The heart of a servant.”
LOOKING AHEAD
McKay’s wife, Judy, had always wanted her own home, Eugene McKay said. Once all their children graduated college, he told her to start looking.
“We looked at all the new houses in Beebe and Searcy and Cabot and whatever,” he said. “She found something wrong with every one of ’em. And so I made a note of the things she didn’t like, and so when I built the new house, I didn’t have those in it.”
He also bought a plot of 3.6 acres across the street.
“My wife said, ‘Why in the world do you want that?’” McKay recalled. “I said, ‘When I retire, I’m going to have the biggest flower garden in Arkansas.’ And she said, ‘Oh, you won’t ever retire.’ She was close on that.”
She had only lived in their new home for a few months when she died of breast cancer in June 2013.
Before she died, she made photo books of their family — the booklet chronicling her life is the most worn, with a crease in the hardcover — and wrote McKay’s 61-page biography.
That fall, ASU-Beebe officials planted a maple tree on campus in her memory. The family also started a scholarship in her name; the first was awarded to a Jacksonville student who wants to be an elementary school teacher.
Shortly after, McKay approached Welch about retirement. Top administrators at Beebe were leaving, and McKay thought it apt if he, too, parted ways with the college.
“I think he really needed the job to help him get through that period,” Welch said. “He said, ‘The only reason I was wanting to stay is to hit that magical 50-year mark, and that’s not really a reason.’ There’s really been a peace about him since he made that decision.”
Retirement opens up new possibilities for McKay.
There’s more reading. He owns a collection of books tucked away in a storage closet at the Beebe college, and he has yet to crack them open. Maybe travel with his sister. More time with grandchildren. He has a woodworking shop. And he still aspires to have the largest garden in the state, with all his favorites: roses, marigolds, irises.
Judy didn’t like flowers, McKay said. Growing up, she played piano at all the funerals for a small Baptist church — most of the time she saw flowers, he said.
“I still bought her flowers,” he said. “One year, it was our 45th anniversary … and I bought her 45 red roses, $238 if I remember correctly, and I took ’em home, and she was allergic to ’em. So I put them out on the front porch. I told her I loved her every day, and as I told my boys the other day, I’ve never regretted that.”