EACC board approves UA System merger

A few weeks after the East Arkansas Community College board of trustees empowered President Cathie Cline and Chairman Brent Howton to begin official negotiations with the University of Arkansas System to eventually join it, the college’s board unanimously approved becoming a member of the UA System during a special meeting Wednesday.

The resolution directs Cline and Howton to implement the merger agreement and plan of transition, but EACC does not expect its leadership, faculty, staff, educational programs or cultural enrichment to change when it becomes the system’s eighth two-year college, according to Lindsay Midkiff, EACC’s associate vice president for public relations and community programs. The college will continue to manage its own budget and personnel under the leadership of Cline and a local Board of Visitors, who will continue to advise on matters related to budgets and programming.

The UA System board of trustees will also need to approve such a merger, the next step in a process that could take roughly a year to complete and would need final approval from the Higher Learning Commission, which accredits EACC, according to Midkiff. The agreement approved Wednesday includes a closing date for the merger of March 2025.

The seven other two-year colleges currently under the UA System umbrella have their own unique character and EACC would bring another different perspective to the system, Cline said Thursday.

“They’re all able to be themselves, which is important, and we’re looking forward to being the eighth,” she said.

UA System President Donald Bobbitt and other system administrators visited EACC earlier this year to answer questions from faculty and staff, and they were again present at Wednesday’s meeting, which “impressed everyone,” she added. Those visits “show how welcoming and supportive the UA System is.”

This matter will likely be

on the agenda for the next UA System board of trustees meeting, scheduled for March 12-13 in Little Rock, said Nate Hinkel, director of communications for the UA System.

The college’s mission statement emphasizes providing “affordable and accessible learning opportunities in order to promote student success and to strengthen our community,” and while EACC has fulfilled that mission over its first half-century, joining the UA System “will strengthen our college, our programs and our outreach as we look forward to serving as an academic and economic leader for the next 50 years,” Howton said during Wednesday’s meeting. “We look forward to continuing to empower our students and our community to succeed through business and industry partnerships and educational programming. It’s our duty to look to the future, and I believe that our partnership with the [UA] System will solidify our programs, our mission and our future.”

Joining the UA System “is an opportunity for us [and the system] to grow, and we have a similar mission in the state,” Cline recently said. “We’ve really upped our game recently [in terms of] economic development in the area, and we’ve seen everything the UA System has done with workforce development. They do such a good job.”

The UA System and EACC are already “partners,” in a sense, as EACC has myriad two-plus-two agreements — which simplify the process of transferring from two-year schools to four-year universities for students — with several UA System schools, noted Cline, who is starting her seventh year as president.

For example, “one of our most successful two-plus-two” arrangements is with the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences for nursing students, which “provides a lot to our community, and we have a lot of students transfer to” the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff through a twoplus-two agreement with that university, Cline said.

Students at EACC are especially excited about easier transfers to additional UA System schools, particularly the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville, as “the flagship school in our state means a lot to them,” she added. As part of the system, Delta Dragons will have the opportunity to take advantage of the nationally recognized transfer scholarship program with UA-Fayetteville that allows students who transfer with an associate’s degree to pay the same tuition they were paying at their UA-affiliated community college.

Other benefits of system membership include legal, human resources, fiscal and audit support; statewide policy and resource advocacy; and access to additional resources for employees and students unique to the state’s largest higher education system, Cline said. The UA System has 20 campuses, divisions and units with more than 70,000 students and 30,000 employees.

“We have always maintained a posture of interest in exploring partnerships that have the potential to benefit existing institutions, our current member campuses and the state,” Bobbitt has said. “I am enthusiastic about the possibilities with EACC and learning more about the institution and its people, as well as the communities and students it serves.

“The ultimate mission of the UA System is to make as many high-quality educational opportunities available and accessible to as many Arkansans as possible,” and EACC is deeply rooted in its community, with a “firm grasp on its workforce needs,” he added. “As we look into this potential partnership, we see opportunities for both growing the UA System reach and expanding partnerships with our existing institutions in the region and across the state. EACC faculty and staff do an exceptional job helping their students achieve their educational goals, and we believe there is much we can learn from their successes.”

The two-year college, which began holding classes in 1974, is based in Forrest City but also has a satellite location in Wynne. The closest current UA System member school to EACC is Phillips Community College of the University of Arkansas, with its Helena-West Helena campus roughly 40 miles from Forrest City.

The school’s enrollment hovers between 1,100 and 1,200 students, and “we focus on [offering programs] so students can stay in this area, but also portable, stackable credentials students can take with them wherever they go,” Cline said. “We’re leaning into what’s available locally and needed for employment.”