SOUTH PORTLAND – James Ortiz was a senior at the High School of Commerce in New York City when his social studies teacher issued a directive that changed his life.
“She pulled me aside and said, ‘You’re going to college,’ ” Ortiz recalled. “I hadn’t really considered it. My parents’ goal was for me to finish high school and take a job, and that’s what I was going to do.”
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Ortiz enrolled the next year at Queensborough Community College, setting himself on a diverse and meandering career path that led to his current position as president of Southern Maine Community College.
Ortiz, who announced his retirement Friday, will leave SMCC at the end of July. Since taking the helm in February 2002, he is credited with turning around the school’s finances, shepherding its transition from a technical school to a comprehensive community college, and forging new programs that have helped to grow enrollment from 2,850 to 7,000 students.
He also worked with University of Maine President Robert Kennedy, who retires in June, to establish the Maine Advanced Technology & Engineering Center at a second SMCC campus that’s due to open at the former Brunswick Naval Air Station in September.
“He has brought enormous energy, innovation and focus to SMCC,” said John Fitzsimmons, president of the Maine Community College System. “His impact on the college, the community and the students he has served will be long-lasting.”
Kevin Sweeney, English department chairman and longtime faculty union leader, said SMCC has benefited from Ortiz’s background as a former community college student and his experience in the non-academic work force.
“It made a huge difference,” Sweeney said. “Anybody who has gone to a community college understands what an important first step it can be. He comes from the real world. He’s worked in the real world. He knows what the average person is dealing with.”
Ortiz, 69, said he has worked to keep community colleges affordable, accessible and relevant, in large part because he understands the opportunities that they provide.
Ortiz was born in a small town in Puerto Rico, where his father’s family ran a wholesale supply company for sugar cane farmers and his mother’s family worked in the fields. Ortiz and his parents moved to the United States when he was 3 years old, after his father served in the Army during World War II.
An only child, Ortiz grew up on the Lower East Side of Manhattan. His father, Abraham, was a postal worker. His mother, Manuela, was a seamstress. His neighborhood was filled with immigrants.
After community college, Ortiz graduated from Hunter College with a bachelor’s degree in political science. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, he was a social worker and community organizer for the welfare system in New York City.
Early on, he found himself in the thick of the welfare rights movement, when protesters routinely staged sit-ins calling attention to the system’s bureaucracy and lack of humanity. One day, as he was eating lunch at his desk, about 20 people burst into his office.
“They apologized and said they would give me time to finish my lunch and then they would take over my office,” Ortiz recalled.
The protesters were upset about the lack of safe day-care centers in the city. With more mothers going to work, many were forced to leave their young children with neighbors. In the following years, Ortiz helped to establish several day-care centers in the city.
Later, Ortiz worked as a community liaison for the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare in Boston, then he oversaw a public job training program for the U.S. Department of Labor in Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine.
In 1984, Ortiz moved into the academic world when he became an instructor and coordinator of job training programs at Northern Essex Community College in Haverhill, Mass. He worked at two other community colleges in New York before becoming vice president of academic and student affairs at Bunker Hill Community College in Boston in 1998.
Along the way, he earned a master’s degree in social work at New York University and a doctorate in educational policy and administration at Boston University. With each promotion, his parents asked if he was still teaching.
“They didn’t care so much about me being a dean or becoming president,” Ortiz said. “To them, teaching was the height of success.”
Still, when he isn’t in the classroom, Ortiz teaches by example, according to Glenn Cummings, the former dean of advancement at SMCC who started the college’s Entrepreneurial Center in 2004.
Cummings described Ortiz as a mentor and praised the president’s modest, respectful and strategic management style.
“He is very good at analyzing an individual student’s needs and the regional needs of the community,” said Cummings, who is executive director of Good Will-Hinkley, a school for at-risk youth. “He sought guidance from business leaders and others on how SMCC could add value to the community and then he restructured programs to meet those needs.”
Ortiz overhauled the college’s budget, which faced a $1 million deficit when he started, and continued to wrestle with state funding reductions. He worked with the unions to make difficult staff and program cuts, then set out to diversify programs and increase enrollment.
He worked with area high schools to develop introductory programs to entice students to enroll in college. He approved the expansion of liberal arts and business courses to offer students a more well-rounded education.
Those courses also cost less to offer than technical programs, such as nursing and plumbing, which require smaller class sizes and more costly equipment. As a result, the college’s revenue streams became more balanced and reliable and less dependent on taxpayers.
In 2002, state appropriations covered about 60 percent of SMCC’s budget, while student tuition and fees covered 20 percent, and grants and other revenue covered 20 percent, Ortiz said. Now, state appropriations cover 32 percent, tuition and fees cover 35 percent, and grants and other revenue cover about 33 percent. And yet SMCC’s tuition has increased only three times in the last decade, by about 1 percent each time, to its current level of $6,600 for a two-year degree.
Looking ahead, Ortiz said the Maine Community College System and higher education in general must develop degree programs that are tied to the economy. He said Maine needs a work force that is not only loyal and hardworking but also eager to solve problems and innovate. Those are the qualities that will help the United States stay ahead of manufacturing powerhouses such as China and India, he said.
Ortiz isn’t sure what he’ll do in the next phase of his life. He plans to take six months off to figure it out. He lives in the president’s house on campus and owns a house in Newburyport, Mass., with his wife, Joyce. They have four children and eight grandchildren.
Fitzsimmons said a national search for Ortiz’s replacement will begin immediately so the position can be filled by summer. Ortiz believes the opening will draw plenty of interest, given the college’s continuing growth and desirable Casco Bay location.
Some say it won’t be easy to follow in his footsteps.
“It will be a challenge for his successor to manage the college as well as he has,” said Sweeney, the English department head. “He has been a real entrepreneurial president. SMCC was the capstone project of his career. If he were being graded, he’d get all A’s.”
Staff Writer Kelley Bouchard can be contacted at 791-6328 or at:
kbouchard@pressherald.com
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