Background

Served as President of Roanoke-Chowan Community College in Ahoskie from 2013-2016. He previously served as Interim Chancellor at Central Louisiana Technical Community College in Alexandria, Louisiana (2012-2013), President of College of the Mainland in Texas City, Texas (2009-2011) and Vice President for Student Development at Daytona State College in Daytona Beach (1999-2009).
He also served as Interim Chancellor at SOWELA Technical Community College in Lake Charles, Louisiana.
Elam received his bachelor’s degree in zoology from Howard University, his master’s degree in Student Personnel and Administration from Howard University and his Ed.D in Education in Higher Education Leadership from Nova Southeastern University in Ft. Lauderdale.

The interview

Why did you want to apply to be president of HCC?

Since I’ve been working as the president of Roanoke-Chowan Community College, I realized that the challenges we face in Northeastern North Carolina are those challenges that I would really like to continue to address.
Halifax Community College shares a county with Roanoke-Chowan Community College and that’s Northampton County. I’m very familiar with the demographics, with the challenges that we are facing here.
We had really began to make some serious headway in our region in the Hertford County and Northampton County area, Bertie County with some very innovative approaches to dealing with some of those challenges, the healthcare challenge for one. We were also collaborating with education and the governor’s office to deal with some academies. The more and more people we can get educated in our region, the better off I think we will all be and everyone else in the Northeastern North Carolina region will be because we need to put people to work. We need to get our region economically ready to go to work. We need to help position ourselves to draw business and industry back to Northeastern North Carolina.
We know that employment is not growing, we know that people actually are not moving to Northeastern North Carolina, they’re actually moving away and so we need to turn that around. The way we do that is we get more people educated, you make the area more attractive to business and industry. If you draw more business and industry you can draw more people back to the area. Just look at the Klausner lumber mill coming back to the area bringing 350 jobs to this area. It’s not a total net of 350 because we had the closure of Safelite.
The community college plays a significant role in preparing individuals and preparing the region to be ready for those roles.
I believe that I have the passion for it, because I was born in Northeastern North Carolina and I still have roots here. So this is giving me an opportunity to put back into my own family tree and to continue to nourish it.

What do you feel you can bring to the table for the college?

Besides the passion to get the work done, the experience I believe that with me I bring a competitive edge to the table. The fact that I’ve got the experience of being a president at other different places, I’ve been an interim chancellor at the Louisiana system, I know what it takes to get things done and to collaborate with others. That’s what it takes at small institutions like Halifax, like Roanoke-Chowan. There’s no going past that. It’s all about relationships, it’s all about building relationships with people and I do that well.

What would you like to see done at the community college should you get the job?

There’s several things I’d like to see done. I’d like to see the college grow. I’d like to see us become a very, very strong catalyst in the community for economic development. I think that it’s important for us to be out there in the forefront doing what we can to help the community to grow and draw business and industry to the area. Many, many, many colleges across the country and education have done too little, too late. We tout being a workforce entity but by the time we train people and they get their degree, business and industry has already moved onto something else. So it’s important for us to get out in front of it. We need to be talking to business and industry and be forecasting what do you need two to three years from now and then preparing ourselves, working with them to help us so that by the time they need a good workforce or the worker, the worker is coming off of our assembly line trained and ready to work. That’s what I would like to see us grow to, to provide workers to be day one ready. So being a very strong workforce entity in our community, that’s one. Also making sure our academics advising arm is extremely robust and our students know what they want to do early on in life so that we have almost a K through 20 conveyor belt here in this area that early on students are identified with what they want to do when they grow up and then we coddle them, massage them through the pathway so there can be remediation. They don’t need anything except support going through that channel, that successful pathway to success, to a meaningful job, to be credentialed.
I would like to see courses stackable, that when they finish high school they have some certifications that if they are not ready to go right off to college they can get a job.

Who influenced your decision to get into education?

I have a history, my sister is a teacher, my mother is a nurse although I was kind of the first in my household to actually go off and finish a four-year degree. I did that almost on a dare. I was angry. I was an honor student in high school and when I was finishing high school I was going to go straight off to the military. Well my mother and my sister found out about it because they knew I was approaching graduation and they said what are you going to do now? What college are you going to? Well I said I’m not going to college. Well, you know, Vietnam, the war was going on. Their eyes got as big as silver dollars. They said you’re going to college and I said no, I’m not, you can’t tell me where I’m going and we got into a tug-of-war there. They literally sat me down and practically tied me to a chair and forced me to fill out applications.
I got angry and said if I’m going to go, I’m going to go as far away from home as I can go. I started to applying to colleges far away. I went to Howard University because it was the furthest away.
Then as I went forward they asked me what’s going to be your major and the only thing I heard growing up was my mom saying you’re going to be a doctor. I majored in zoology but not really having a mentor or father in the home, I didn’t realize there were other tickets I needed to punch along the way. By the time it was time to graduate I hadn’t punched all of those tickets but what I had done was gain a lot of experience in higher education. I had been an RA, I had been a peer counselor, I had been a peer recruiter. I had been a big time recruiter for the school. So I had all of this experience in higher education and I didn’t even know you could have jobs until it was time to go off to graduate school and then I realized I could have a career in higher education.
I aspire to be a servant leader so if I was to pick one person in life to emulate it would be Jesus Christ. The servant leader is what I would want to be and that would be the one who inspires me all the time. In earth it has been an eclectic approach and always wanting to improve upon myself, just like to improve upon an institution to make a good institution greater.

Any favorite book you’ve read or any favorite person you’ve drawn inspiration from the most?

Probably the books that inspired me the most would be Stephen Covey from his books, The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. Those were early inspirations and they still drive me. Also the Total Quality Management principles, early on they still drive me and formulate everything I do. We talk about lifelong learning in education and continuous learning and that’s what total quality improvement is for me. We’re always learning and we’re always putting that learning into action, meaning we’re always improving and growing. Product for us is student success, how do we make students more successful, how do we make our institutions better and greater. We focus on processes, refining those processes and making them better to improve our customer service, to improve our customer relationships and it hopefully improves the overall dynamics of the institution in relationships and resources.
I think total quality management is such a great principle. It has so much in it that it helps and speaks to what we do today that can help our institutions grow into flourishing institutions that will serve our community well.

How will the possible change in the state governor’s race change education on the community college level?

I have been successful in working with the governor’s office in the past. I had a project working with the governor’s office creating some academies in Bertie County where we would provide certifications in two levels, one in criminal justice and the other was for EMT.
We would provide first level certifications for students coming out of high school and then working with the county commission, working with DPS and other local agencies including the emergency management directors and so forth. The state helped us to move that through with resources that we would need to get the scholarships, some books and things, uniforms for the students and sanction the program if we needed to get something certified through the state level. I don’t see that going away. We would do what it took with whatever administration is in place for the benefit of our students. We would work with whomever we have to work with to make sure our students can be successful.