Spring 2024 - The Talon

At the time of the April session of the Central Methodist University board of trustees, board chairman Nancy Peacock ’82 sat down in the Ashby-Hodge Gallery of American Art with Dr. Bill Sheehan ’84, executive vice president, to discuss her role with the board and the state of the university. Dr. Peacock shared her insights on the landscape of higher education and how CMU is positioned within it.

The following interview has been edited for clarity and length.

Dr. Bill Sheehan: Nancy, we’re here talking to you about your role as chair of the board of trustees. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background with Central, if you would.

Dr. Nancy Peacock: I’m Nancy Walker Peacock, I graduated from Central in 1982 and went to medical school at the University of Missouri. I live in Nashville, TN with my husband of 35 years, Mark. We have spent our careers there, raised our children there and made a great life in Music City. I am currently the chairman of the board of trustees of Central Methodist University.

Dr. Sheehan: As chair of the board, what does that really mean? What does the chairman do on a day-to-day or even year-to-year kind of basis?

Dr. Peacock: I view my job as the organizational facilitator of the board. There are a lot of moving parts to the board of trustees and to an institution of higher education, so I am constantly thinking about filling board memberships, understanding the skills and talents of our board members, and how to engage these talented and busy people for the advancement of the University.

I have the opportunity to speak with the president regularly to make sure that he and I are communicating on any issues that may be developing. Higher education is a tough, tough business right now. There is so much pressure on institutions that provide college and graduate degrees. Critics currently view a college education as elitist, as too expensive, as not worth the investment. So the goal is to preserve CMU as a great place for our students to learn, to express themselves, and to lead great lives after they graduate. We think about that all the time.

Dr. Sheehan: We’ll talk about a lot of those issues that you brought up, but talk about your role specifically with Dr. Drake and how you can help, advise, and guide. How does that work?

Dr. Peacock: Obviously, Dr. Drake is an exceptional president. He has a great fund of knowledge, he knows how to run a university, he knows how to run a business. He is extraordinarily personable, and I know he can foresee both problems and opportunities on the horizon. He understands trends in higher education and has guided the University to

make decisions that take advantage of those trends and provide better educational opportunities for our students.

My relationship with him is as a sounding board. He will check in with me once a week and tell me what’s been happening on campus. We talk about personnel issues, student issues, institutional campus issues. Our conversations are directed so that he can discuss what’s been most important on campus that week. I rarely add any problem-solving solutions to his thoughts, but talking through all of those issues is really important.

Dr. Sheehan: You mentioned earlier the rest of the trustees and what they bring. Talk a little bit about what the incredibly talented group of trustees bring and how then to get 35-38 people all on the same page.

Dr. Peacock: We are able to converse well with one another in a civil fashion when issues are presented to us. Our board meetings are conversational – everyone offers their opinions and each of those opinions are respected. We have people from all generations, from their 40s to their 80s. I think that perspective and range of views is so important.

We all love this beautiful campus. We love coming to Fayette because it’s such a pretty town. But we don’t live here, so we don’t see all the dayto-day issues, but we’re trying to understand them. Having conversations about what’s important, what’s the true heart of the school and how we protect that for the betterment of all involved is under constant consideration.

Dr. Sheehan: When we were in school, Central was financially not in very good shape. We were really struggling. We’re not there today. Talk about where we are and how we got here, because it seems to me a lot of the credit should go to board leadership over the last 30 or 40 years.

Dr. Peacock: As part of the board and administrative leadership, I think that we recognize what the most important needs are. We would love to wave a magic wand and drop hundreds of millions of dollars on the campus in order to make everything perfect, to raise salaries and to hire more people, and to attract more students. The reality is that we have limited financial resources, and our responsibility is to be good stewards of those monies, using our finances where they will have the biggest and best impact.

Here are some things I’m really proud of. Our endowment is good. It is solid. We can’t readily spend it. We use it to help generate revenue for the operations of the university. We have no debt, which is unheard of for other institutions our size. No debt. That’s largely because our donors have been so generous in support of our University.

I’ve been on the board quite a while, and we’ve done some great things. I started when the Inman Student and Community Center was being finished and that was transformational for the campus. Since that time, we’ve refurbished Classic Hall, which has allowed for the development of this beautiful Ashby-Hodge Gallery that we’re sitting in now. We have updated Stedman Hall of Science, built the Thogmorton Center for Allied Health, renovated and repurposed Assembly Hall, which is now a wonderful meeting space. We’re still working on residence halls and about to finish a transformational project for the city of Fayette, Eagle Plaza, which is the new apartment-style dorm space on the square. And, we have updated our baseball and softball fields.

Dr. Sheehan: You were on the board at the time when we implemented Digital U, and you were part of that team that made the decisions. Tell us about how that positioned Central differently than everybody else in our space.

Dr. Peacock: We started Digital U because of the leadership of former board chair Bob Courtney. It was necessary for Central to become internet accessible and we needed to make sure our students had technical skills to prepare them for the workforce. We decided to put iPads in the hands of our freshmen, but also had to help our faculty teach with new technology and then how to engage students with that same technology.

Soon enough, our faculty and students mastered the technology, new ways to communicate were developed, and then we had the pandemic a few years later. And so, when we had to close campus to our students they were able to continue their education because of Digital U. We found ourselves in a much better situation for online learning than we might have been without that investment a few years earlier.

Dr. Sheehan: One of the things that I know you’re working on right now with the board and with the senior leadership is strategic planning. Lots of people talk about strategic planning like you’ve got to do it, then you set it on the bookshelf so that 10 years from now you can go back and look at it and start all over again. Talk about what Central is doing with strategic planning and why what we’re doing is different.

Dr. Peacock: This is a board-led initiative. I asked every board committee to look at the strategic plan to think about what they envisioned over the next five to ten years as being most critical. And as a result of that, they each undertook their own learning initiatives. They engaged the VPs, the administration, online resources, thought leaders in other areas of higher education and asked a lot of questions.

There’s been a lot of interaction. We have a special committee that oversees all of the committees’ work on the strategic plan. Once we have identified the key goals and objectives, we will turn it over to the administrative staff to figure out what is the most important for our University and how to implement it.

You have to understand that the old model for the board was for us to show up, have wonderful conversations, be presented with one aspect of higher education that we needed to hear, and then, we were expected to make good decisions. And that worked, for a while, but technology and education are moving so rapidly right now. There are multiple projects on campus, multiple issues to deal with, related to the educational process. The board senses that as well, because in their local communities, they’re sensing new social and economic pressures. Everybody’s engaged, we have all 40 members on our board fully engaged in the success of the University and that has been a wonderful process to watch.

Dr. Sheehan: Nancy, talk a little bit about where you see the landscape in higher ed. Where do you see the industry, but also where do you think the trustees see the position of Central, let’s say 10 years out? Where do we want to be?

Dr. Peacock: Well, I think that as we’ve worked through our strategic plan, we see ourselves with a healthy number of students on campus, but we’re also looking into alternative methods of education. Specifically, how do we educate nontraditional students, people over the age of 22, who want to either go back and finish their degree or even start a degree, because they’ve realized that they can get good jobs in their communities if they have a nursing degree or if they have a counseling degree or if they finish their master’s in education?

I think we’ll use virtual and online education more robustly and we will partner with other institutions in higher education as we do that. I think we will always try to support our Fayette campus because it’s a beautiful campus in a beautiful town. It’s a safe place to send young people to go to college. We will see a blending of educational outreach that will be customer (student) driven.

As we continue to grow and sustain our Fayette campus and our online educational efforts, we’ll continue to use the best methods available to us related to best outcomes known to the science of education,

Dr. Sheehan: As an alumna, as somebody who’s served on the board for years and now as chair of the board, take a moment and just be prideful, boastful about why Central matters, why you are so excited about the future of Central.

Dr. Peacock: I think it matters because we put our graduates into the communities to take care of those communities. The students and graduates who leave Central are going to go back into their hometowns or into other areas with a heart for service, a heart for education and learning, and a heart to say, “I was in this really special place for a short amount of time.” You don’t realize it while you’re here, but I think once you leave, you go, “Wow, that was an experience that my friends and my colleagues who I work with now didn’t get.”

As Marianne Inman, the president before Roger Drake, was always fond of saying, there’s always a Central connection. And that’s true. I think you can go into a community and all of a sudden you hear of somebody who also went to Central. It may have been 10 years before you, it may have been 10 years after you, but it’s always fun to connect with those people and talk about your experience.

Dr. Sheehan: Nancy, thanks for doing this. This was so much fun, to relive part of your career but also understand where the trustees are and how your leadership has moved us forward. Thank you for your leadership as the chair and the 20-plus years as a board member. It’s been great. We appreciate it.