Ohlone College president to retire in June after 12 years at helm

Ohlone College’s longtime president, Gari Browning, will retire at the end June, marking 12 years at the head of the institution.

During her tenure, she has overseen a $349 million bond that financed a significant revamp of the community college’s Fremont campus, led the development of a new strategic plan and promoted the institution’s value to the community. “It’s been a long and happy career for me. I’ve been doing this for quite some time,” Browning said of her time in the community college system.

Before taking the helm at Ohlone — the long-standing community college with campuses in Fremont and Newark, serving about 17,000 students annually — Browning was the academic vice president at College of the Desert in Southern California.

She got her start as a faculty member at Orange Coast College in 1981 and worked her way up to an administrative role, she said.

“I feel like the college is at a good point. It certainly will be by the end of this academic year,” Browning said in a telephone interview last week. “We’ll have a new strategic plan in place, we’ll have just finished an accreditation evaluation, and we will also be moved into our academic core, our new buildings.

“It’s an opportunity to have the college in pretty good condition and hand it over to new leadership, and I think it’s just the right moment,” she said.

The three “academic core” buildings are the planned centerpiece of a major renovation to the Fremont campus and will house science labs and prep rooms, a recital hall and band room, a recording studio and photography lab, and a new library and learning resource center, among other facilities.

The buildings — along with many other renovation projects already completed, including new baseball, softball and soccer fields, a revamped swimming pool, and a new 900-space parking structure and a megawatt solar panel array — were funded by the $349 million Measure G bond, passed by local voters in 2010.

Browning also said she’s proud of the Ohlone Promise scholarship

she helped establish, which has helped more than 100 high school students from Fremont, Newark and Union City by covering the cost of tuition, fees and books for a full two years.

In addition to the college’s well-known certificate

and degree programs, Browning said the “growing portion” of the school is in a “whole new array of career and technical programs.”

The school is also “making our internship offerings much more robust than they have been,” she said.

Browning also oversaw some failed attempts to develop the 15-acre chunk of real estate at the frontage of the Fremont campus

along Mission Boulevard, to generate revenue for the school in the long term. The most recent plans for stores, flats and townhouses went nowhere after pushback from residents over potential traffic problems and lukewarm response from elected and appointed officials.

The school said a search for Browning’s successor will begin in November.