On February 1, 1994, Richard Fonte took the reigns as president of Austin Community College. The school continued its amazing growth in virtually all areas: academic programs, job training for production positions in the high-tech industries that were moving into the Central-Texas region, and professional development which went largely unrecognized by residents of the district. Fonte came to ACC following eight years as president of South Suburban Community College in Holland, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. He also taught American government, wanting to maintain direct contact with students.
This was an excellent time to study and teach the principles and dynamics of government. The post-Cold War political realignment juxtaposed the Soviet Union’s claim that authoritarian socialism was the only path to democracy and America’s standard of living that much of the world envied. On a smaller stage, some members of ACC’s faculty and the student body sought to participate directly in the governance of the College–sometime seen as a bottom-up rather than a top-down model. Indeed, the community-college movement in the 1960s and 1970s had promoted a bottom-up model, almost like a gene in the community-college DNA. President Fonte found himself in the middle of skirmishes over what was called “shared governance.”
Fonte declared that ACC was too slow in responding to requests from local business, especially in high-tech areas, for trained employees. The way he put it: ” we [ACC] have not been especially user-friendly or customer-driven.” Through his administrative team, Fonte tried to change the culture of the school, for instance by urging faculty and other employees to regard students as customers.” Some members of the faculty objected to Fonte’s combative style
Other changes occurred too. Allen Kaplan, a political campaign consultant, ran for, and won, a seat on the ACC governing board, defeating the incumbent Jan Albers by a popular vote of 22.131 to 16,477. Kaplan won the support of students by promising to make the administration easier to deal withand employee groups and understood the value of a strong community college to the economy of the greater Austin area. Businesses were taking a greater interest in ACC as a source of workforce training, and Mike Midgely was a key implementer not only of workforce training but also transfer pathways from ACC to both Texas State University and the University of Texas.