New Kirkwood President Kristie Fisher personifies community college mission

The path Kristie Fisher took from student at Prairie High School in the 1980s to president of Kirkwood Community College today was a lot longer and more winding than the two miles of physical distance that separate the schools on the south end of Cedar Rapids.

Given her career path did include several stints at Kirkwood, though, perhaps a more apt description of Fisher’s journey to the leadership post she begins Monday is zigzagging — as she bounced in and out of the college first as a student and later as giving director and vice president, in between stops at the University of Iowa, Iowa State University, College Community School District, and ACT, Inc.

“I changed my major so many times in undergrad, I think was six or seven times,” Fisher, now 52, told The Gazette about the explorative — and very community college-esque — course she charted through her academic and professional career.

“When I got to the end, my adviser said, ‘You know, you're graduating a year early, right?’” Fisher said of her UI bachelor’s degree. “I didn't know it. And then I literally asked, ‘Oh, which major?’ because I had taken so many classes in so many different things.”

Fisher had long envisioned herself going to law school and so applied to the UI College of Law straight out of undergrad.

“And then I kind of realized in August of the year I was supposed to start that, ‘Oh, I don't think I made a conscious decision that I was going to law school’,” she said. “It's just, I got accepted. And so it seemed like the right thing to do because I had so many friends who didn't get accepted.”

But further reflection redirected her to a job working with at-risk 3- and 4-year-olds in Cedar Rapids.

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“I quickly learned that I didn't have what it took to teach,” Fisher said. “I thought, ‘Wow, this is really hard work.’ But I did really like the social impact.”

She also enjoyed working with grants at that job, steering her toward her next position in 1992 — 70 miles away in Waterloo, doing grant writing for a substance abuse agency.

“I drove to Waterloo every day from Swisher, Iowa,” Fisher said of her hometown, Swisher-Sheuyville, from which she’s never strayed too far.

'Give Kirkwood a try’

As a kid, Fisher said she loved school and learning but wasn’t mapping out her higher education path. She was a first-generation college student — meaning neither her dad, who worked at ADM as an industrial maintenance worker, nor her mom, who cleaned houses, got higher-ed degrees.

“She started cleaning houses to put us through college,” Fisher said of her mom.

Although Fisher was the first of her siblings to pursue higher learning, her sister eventually earned a nursing degree and her brother went to UI and then Harvard.

“So my parents did pretty well to have all kids with college degrees,” Fisher said.

And it was her dad who directed Fisher to her first experience at Kirkwood.

“Honestly, my plan had been to go to the University of Iowa, because that's what I knew,” she said. “But my dad was a big fan of Kirkwood, and he just asked me, he goes, ‘Will you just give Kirkwood a try for one semester? And if you don't like it, go to Iowa’.”

Fisher tried it, liked it, and finished her associate degree before transferring to Iowa, where she got her bachelor’s degree — later earning a Master of Business Administration at UI and then Doctor of Philosophy, with a higher education major, from Iowa State, where she did a dissertation about “service on the community college campus: the millennial generation perspective.”

“It was one of those very lucky conversations where Dad just said, ‘Would you give it a try?’” Fisher said of her first leap to Kirkwood, possibly bookending her academic and professional pursuits.

“I had made the decision when I went to Iowa Valley,” Fisher said of her most recent job as president of the Iowa Valley Community College District, “I was either going to retire there, or I was going to come back to Kirkwood.”

Kirkwood experience

Fisher’s first Kirkwood-affiliated job was as annual giving director for its foundation, where she — at age 23 — got to work with then-Kirkwood President Norm Nielsen, who led the campus from 1985 to 2005. Working with him and the foundation leadership, she said, “was like a gift.”

“I couldn’t go back and find a better path for me,” she said. “But I was there five years and then when I had my second child, and she was turning 1, I had an opportunity to go over to Prairie with a much lighter schedule.”

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Eventually, Fisher found her way back to Kirkwood — serving first as assistant to then-President Mick Starcevich before becoming vice president of student services. She left for a vice presidential position at ACT in 2014, before applying a first time for the Kirkwood presidency upon Starcevich’s retirement in June 2018.

She was one of four finalists, but lacked experience.

“I knew it going in, that the board really wanted a sitting president,” Fisher said. “So I really felt like it was an honor that they would entertain me.”

The next year, Fisher went and got that experience, stepping in as head of the Iowa Valley Community College District — along the way establishing a friendship with the woman Kirkwood did hire as its new president: Lori Sundberg.

So when Sundberg recently decided she was going to retire, she reached out to Fisher and suggested she apply — which she did, this time achieving a different result.

'The president part’

When asked why she wants to lead a community college right now — at a time of upheaval across higher education, facing enrollment cliffs and funding challenges and new technology demanding faculty flexibility and collaboration with artificial intelligence and non-traditional students — Fisher said, essentially, because of all that.

“I think there's no more important time, because it is a crazy time,” she said. “There's so much unknown in the world and in higher ed at this moment, I feel like leadership's never been more important.”

And the work that community colleges do, specifically, is at the heart of all the social and economic changes forcing higher education into a reckoning.

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“If you think about the wealth divide in America, and the political divide, and all these things that divide people, one of the things I've always loved about community colleges is that we're bipartisan, we can help people from all walks of life meet their individual goals, we help communities rise up,” she said. “And so I feel like there's just never been a more important time for community colleges.”

Having personal experience with career and technical education in her family members, the transfer process in her own pursuits, grant writing and fundraising in her early career, cross-campus collaboration in her leadership endeavors, and the plight of first-generation students trying to manage the rising cost of tuition — just like she did — Fisher can relate to the mission she’s driving.

“And Kirkwood has always been a leader,” she said.

So has the Eastern Iowa corridor, where she has lived for much of her life.

“This corridor really values education,” said Fisher, appreciative of the opportunities it offered her to feel her way to the perfect position, which — ironically — is not so far away from her answer to the childhood question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

“President of the United States,” Fisher said. “So my friends, when I became a community college president, said, ‘Well you got the president part right’.”

Vanessa Miller covers higher education for The Gazette.

Comments: (319) 339-3158; vanessa.miller@thegazette.com