It's getting busy as the lunch hour nears at JTown's Grill on East Johnson Avenue near the Arkansas State University campus in Jonesboro, but Kelly Damphousse has saved me a seat.
Damphousse is the ASU chancellor, and ASU is why Jonesboro is booming. The university has become an economic and cultural engine, helping propel Jonesboro from a population of 27,050 in the 1970 census to more than 76,000 residents today.
While most of the Arkansas Delta has been losing population since 1960, Jonesboro has almost tripled in size. Damphousse, who was raised in a fishing village in northern Canada, wants to keep that engine roaring despite the fact that the number of college-age students is declining.
"We're trying to figure out what the future holds," he says. "Too many potential students and their parents now believe that the cost of college is no longer worth it. We must find ways to get the facts in their hands and convince them that it's worth what they pay. Second, we must get better at keeping students in school once they get here."
During the past decade, the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville has relied heavily on students from Texas to spur enrollment growth. Meanwhile, ASU has focused on recruiting Arkansas students, especially those from the eastern half of the state. Damphousse points with pride to the fact that 82 percent of those in the current freshman class hail from Arkansas. About 90 percent of the student body is from Arkansas or a bordering state.
"We can change lives here," Damphousse says. "And if we change enough lives, we change the region."
If he were still around, Gov. George Washington Donaghey would be amazed at what happened with the old First District Agricultural School. Donaghey was governor from 1909-13 and was considered a progressive for his time. He was born on a farm in Louisiana. His family moved to the Lapile community in Union County two years after he was born. Donaghey grew up in south Arkansas, worked in Texas for a time, and then moved to Conway in 1880 at age 24 to live with an uncle. He stayed there for the next three decades.
Donaghey believed strongly in higher education. He contributed $1,500 (a third of his total assets at the time) to the successful effort to convince Arkansas Methodists to move Hendrix College from Altus to Conway. He later pledged $5,000 to
bring what was then Central College for Women to Conway. He also was in charge of the fundraising effort to get the Arkansas State Normal School (now the University of Central Arkansas) to Conway.
Donaghey became wealthy as a railroad contractor and moved to Little Rock in 1908. He defeated William F. Kirby, a former Arkansas attorney general, in the Democratic primary that year. It was the first major defeat for the machine headed by U.S. Sen. Jeff Davis. Donaghey then defeated Republican John Worthington in the fall with 71 percent of the vote.
During the 1909 legislative session, the Donaghey administration pushed a bill that established four agricultural high schools. In addition to the school at Jonesboro, there was a school at Russellville that would become Arkansas Tech University, a school at Magnolia that would become Southern Arkansas University, and what would become the University of Arkansas at Monticello. The legislation creating the four schools was a goal of the Arkansas Farmers Union, which had started at Spring Hill in Hempstead County in 1903.
"Its populism mirrored earlier farmers' movements, including the Farmers' Alliance and Agricultural Wheel," writes Arkansas history expert Charley Sandage of Mountain View. "Focused on those who actually produced food and fiber, the union was often at odds with banks, commodity exchanges, processors and shippers. As larger corporate farms emerged, the union aspired to speak for family farmers. ... Bankers, lawyers, merchants and speculators were denied membership in the union, but teachers were admitted alongside farmers."
In March 1910, the board overseeing the First District Agricultural School selected a farm just outside Jonesboro as its location. Jonesboro had a population of 7,100 at the time.
Victor Kays, who was 28, was hired as the first principal. He would head the school for the next 33 years. An Illinois native, Kays was the director of an agricultural school in Wetumpka, Ala., when he met an Arkansas state senator from Antioch in White County named Charles Bush.
Bush was a member of the First District Agricultural School board and was touring agricultural training schools across the South. Bush recruited Kays, and Kays made the move west in June 1910.
The first day of classes was Oct. 3, 1910. There were 189 students who met in rented rooms in downtown Jonesboro until a main building and two residence halls could be built on the 442-acre plot that had been purchased for the school.
"Kays nurtured the young institution and its growing student body," Tom Moore writes for the Central Arkansas Library System's Encyclopedia of Arkansas. "He emphasized instruction in advanced farming methods such as crop rotation. One of his first initiatives was acquiring the first herd of Holstein dairy cattle in the state, not only for training the students in livestock farming but also for providing dairy products to campus residents. The Arkansas General Assembly appointed an investigative committee in 1915 to examine the performance of the agricultural schools. The committee's report praised the school's facilities and its leader."
The report stated: "We find Professor Kays a most excellent gentleman, of indispensable value as the head of such a school. ... The only deplorable fact in regard to his service to the state is that he is paid a mere pittance for his services."
A two-year college program was added in 1918. In 1925, the school was renamed the First District Agricultural & Mechanical College. Four-year degree programs were offered starting in 1930. When a fire destroyed the main building the next year, classes met in a dairy barn.
Kays had powerful allies he could call on, including U.S. Sen. Hattie Caraway and R.E.L. Wilson, who owned one of the world's largest cotton plantations in Mississippi County. The school became Arkansas State College in 1933.
"Federal funding helped keep the college's doors open during World War II, which came on the heels of the Great Depression," Moore writes. "Also, Kays formed a charitable foundation, the Arkansas State College Foundation, to assist with institutional finances. ... After retiring as president in January 1943, Kays was named president emeritus and retained as business manager. After his successor's resignation in 1945, he served as acting president for nearly a year."
After having dropped to a low of 114 students during World War II, returning veterans (attending college thanks to the G.I. Bill) caused enrollment to grow to more than 1,000 students following the war. The college had two presidents during the eight years after Kays' retirement, but a new era of stability began with the hiring of Carl Reng in 1951. By 1960, there were 3,000 students. In 1955, graduate-level courses were offered for the first time.
An effort in 1959 to change the name of Arkansas State College to Arkansas State University failed in the face of heavy opposition from the University of Arkansas. Reng kept soliciting legislative support. In 1967, legislation was approved changing the institution's name to Arkansas State University.
Reng retired in 1975. Ross Pritchard served as president from 1975-78 and was followed by two men with deep political and business connections, Carl Whillock (1978-80) and Ray Thornton (1980-84). Those connections ensured continued growth. Eugene Smith, who had graduated from the school in 1952 and returned as a faculty member in 1958, was president from 1984-92. During his tenure, a doctoral program in education leadership was started. ASU also moved to a higher NCAA level in athletics.
An administrative reorganization took place in 2006 with Robert Potts hired as the chancellor of the Jonesboro campus. Les Wyatt was president of the ASU System at that point. Chuck Welch, who became the system president in April 2011, is based in Little Rock. Damphousse (whose name is pronounced DAM-fiss) became chancellor on July 1, 2017.
Damphousse earned an associate's degree in law enforcement in 1982 from Lethbridge Community College in Canada. A failed professional hockey tryout ended his goal of becoming a goalie in the NHL. By then, Damphousse was focused on becoming an officer with the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. He worked as a corrections officer in Alberta for three years before heading to Texas to complete a bachelor's degree in criminal justice.
He met a Texas native, Beth Smith, who Damphousse said "neither wanted to marry a cop or a Canadian." She became his wife, and Damphousse returned to graduate school at Texas A&M University after brief stints as a security manager for Macy's in Atlanta and New Orleans.
Damphousse's teaching career began in 1994 at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He moved to the University of Oklahoma in 1997 and was the dean of OU's largest and oldest college when he came to Jonesboro. He is known for his hands-on involvement at the school; his cell number and social media addresses are on his business cards, and he asks to be called by his first name.
ASU now has an enrollment of more than 14,000 students with about 150 degree areas of study. The campus is home to the New York Institute of Technology's College of Osteopathic Medicine. ASU is involved in the creation of Mexico's first American-style university and has recently worked with O'Reilly Hospitality Management to open the Embassy Suites and Red Wolf Convention Center on the campus. That was a $60 million project.
Other recent projects include massive renovations to Centennial Bank Stadium, a new building for social science and humanities classes and a student activity center. The building named for R.E.L. Wilson, which was constructed in the 1930s, was transformed into the College of Osteopathic Medicine.
"More people are beginning to recognize the ASU brand," Damphousse says. "This state deserves more than one great research-based institution."
He's quick to note that Jonesboro's growth also has been driven by the fact that the city became a regional medical center and a hub for the food-processing industry. Agriculture is still the major industry in northeast Arkansas, but Damphousse says that what began as an agricultural school now has programs focused on "teaching the technology of farming. Agriculture has become a high-tech business, and we've had to make that transition along with the industry."
Damphousse also is excited that more than 5,300 students now take online courses from ASU.
"We have to be entrepreneurial in how we do things in higher education these days," he says.
Damphousse has joined forces with Welch, a first-generation college student who grew up in Jonesboro and became the first member of either side of his extended family to receive a graduate degree, to make sure that ASU continues to play the leading role in Jonesboro's growth.
Editorial on 01/19/2020