Todd Shields’ vision
Todd Shields, the enthusiastic chancellor of Arkansas State University at Jonesboro, is giving me a campus tour in a golf cart. I’m in Jonesboro on a regular basis, but I’m surprised with just how much is going on these days.
We pass the parking lot that will be the site of Windgate Hall of Art & Innovation. In December 2021, the Windgate Foundation awarded the school $25 million, the largest gift in ASU history. The gift designated $20 million for construction and $5 million for a building maintenance endowment.
Windgate has given ASU almost $40 million in recent years. Windgate Hall will be part of a larger Art & Innovation District, which will include the Windgate Center for Three-Dimensional Arts. That $7.9 million facility opened in the fall of 2021.
The Windgate Center for Three-Dimensional Arts replaced an 85-year-old retrofitted gymnasium. The new building includes state-of-the-art kilns and workspaces for ceramics, a woodworking lab, a foundry for castings, student studio and work spaces and areas to display art.
Shields also points out the future site for the College of Veterinary Medicine, which is expected to begin serving students in the fall of 2025. Passing the home of the College of Humanities & Social Sciences, which opened in 2015, Shields says it became “the anchor for our campus that everything else is now being built around.”
The four-story arts and humanities structure covers 123,832 square feet with 29 classrooms, two 90-seat auditoriums, six computer labs, eight seminar rooms and faculty offices. Plans to replace Wilson Hall began in 2001. The final cost of the project was $38.9 million. Wilson Hall, in turn, was renovated to house the New York Institute of Technology’s College of Osteopathic Medicine.
Shields, who came to ASU in 2022 from the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, continues to drive the golf cart across campus, touting the school’s welcome center, its childcare facility and a privately owned food-truck court. He clearly has a vision not only for this campus but also for northeast Arkansas as a whole.
“This reminds me of what Fayetteville was like in the late 1990s,” he tells me. “You can sense that it’s a place that’s about to take off. We’re already having conversations with those involved in the steel industry in Mississippi County. We have to ensure that we’re meeting their needs. The NYIT medical school, meanwhile, is now meeting the need for doctors in the region. The veterinary school will also meet a huge need.”
I ask Shields where he sees ASU in five to 10 years. He doesn’t hesitate in giving me an answer.
“We’ll be more integrated with businesses in Arkansas so we can supply them the talented people they need,” he says. “We will have grown. We’ll serve an increasing number of first-generation college students. Northeast Arkansas will be the steelmaking capital of America. I think we’ll also have a vehicle assembly plant in this part of the state by then. The health-care sector will continue to grow. We’ll be working closely with all of those sectors.”
Beginning this fall, ASU will cover tuition and mandatory fees—and offer a housing stipend—for Arkansans who are first-year, first-time college students from families with adjusted gross incomes of $70,000 or less. The A-State Promise Plus last-dollar scholarship program was announced last fall.
“We heard from a lot of students about the rising cost of housing, so we wanted to help with that,” Shields said at the time of the announcement.
Half of ASU’s current students are first-generation students. Shields says the school has “enough beds, facilities, faculty and staff” to accommodate 1,500 additional students in this fall’s freshman class. The average household income for a family of four in Arkansas is $53,000. ASU research indicates that as many as 80 percent of Arkansas households will qualify.
ASU will become the first campus in Arkansas to have a medical school, veterinary school and biosciences institute within walking distance of each other.
At the time of last fall’s Promise Plus announcement, Ryan Anderson wrote in this newspaper: “With those offerings as well as Promise Plus, Provost Calvin White Jr. said he could see enrollment approach 19,000 in the next three to five years. In addition to attracting more students, Promise Plus may keep students on campus who may have departed before completing a degree in order to work, Shields said. Because of the state’s low unemployment rate and high need for workers, companies often hire students before they’ve completed a degree.
“At age 28 or 30, students realize they can’t advance further in their jobs because of the lack of a college degree, and ‘we’ve been working with local industry on ways they can work while staying in school,’ Shields said.”
ASU had a fall enrollment of 14,903 students.
Qualifying freshmen, who are required to live on the campus, will receive $2,500 toward housing costs. Students who keep the Promise Plus scholarship in subsequent years will receive $4,500 annually for on-campus housing.
ASU said last fall that the number of students living on campus was the highest in the post-pandemic period. When Promise Plus was unveiled, Shields and White pointed out that the university is committed to providing support services so students stay in school until graduation.
“There’s a major difference between thriving and surviving,” White said. “We’re committed to retaining students, not only enrolling them. That’s not the game we’re playing because we have a responsibility to them.”