Vol. 5 Issue 6 No. 40
Mar. 28, 2018
A Splendid Performance
Ryan Perkins Layout Editor This past month, we had a chance to speak to the current president of Eastern New Mexico University, Jeffery Elwell. He is a very talented man and has come a long way to be where he is now. This is his story: Can you tell us a little bit about yourself? “I grew up in southern California in Northridge, which I call the land of earthquakes. In 1970, there was an earthquake and we had to evacuate before the dam broke. Then, I was at Mississippi State running the theater program and watched the big 1994 Northridge earthquake and saw lots of places that I used to walk by every day collapsing and falling in. I grew up there and was a pretty average high school student. I thought I was going to be an olympic gold medalist in decathlon like Bruce Jenner who won in 1976. I graduated in the middle of my class, somewhere around 1144. The high school, Monroe High School, was 4200 for 10th, 11th, and 12th. I think it was the second biggest high school in the country that year. So, I basically knew 2,000 people and I didn’t know 2,000 people. I later went on to take the SAT with a friend, and I really didn’t have any preparation for it. After getting my SAT score, doing very well on the verbal, but horribly on the quantitative, I was told that with my GPA and my SAT score, I would not be able to go to my dream college, which was San Diego State. They had an amazing track program and it was in San Diego, by the coast and all that. I actually went
Dr. Jeffery Elwell, President of ENMU
to a 2-year school on a partial track scholarship up the coast and I ended up graduating from California State in Bakersfield with a 3.0 four years after I graduated high school. It proves that scores can’t measure determination or ability, it’s just sort of one signal. I didn’t know if I could or even would go to college and I’m first generation; my mom and dad did not go to college. So, I actually have a bachelor’s degree in English. I was into journalism, writing sports columns. I was a sports photographer. I was a writer. I ended up going to LSU, because it was a different part of the country. I ended up applying and getting accepted into Louisiana State University and worked for sports information for a while, until they found out I had two
graduate assistantships: one in sports information and one in journalism. With the sports information degree, I worked in the Pete Maravich Assembly Center for a while. I wrote stories about sport practices for various papers. During the games, I would be up in the press box, assisting the writers. The neatest part of the job was that during the last five minutes of the fourth quarter, I would take the writers to the visiting team’s locker room. I met Bear Bryant from Alabama, John Robinson from USC, and
many more. I also worked for the Baton Rouge Morning Advocate, I worked at a local bank, and I worked for Russell Long’s press secretary in the Baton Rouge office. Then I was getting bored halfway through grad school while getting my master’s, and I decided to go home because my mom was getting married for the second time. When I came back, a new dean had come into the journalism school and given away my job. They had assumed that I had quit and taken a job back in California. So I came back without an assistantship, not a good thing in terms of paying for school. I went to work for the university’s news service. I decided that, after a year of doing brochures and other small things, it was not for me. I had always written creatively and I started writing plays and I ended up applying to what was Southwestern Louisiana at the time. I believe it is now University of Louisiana at Lafayette. I became a Ragin’ Cajun, got a master’s in a year, also worked in sports information and then went to get a Ph.D at Southern Illinois University Carbondale in theatre and speech communication. I had already achieved my