UWA embraces label historically assumed synonymous with inadequate to instead reach new heights and support uncharted rise of rural initiatives
Merriam-Webster’s dictionary does not define “rural” with notions of deficiency or lack, yet the term has historically developed connotations of such. The University of West Alabama has a rebuttal for the preconceived notions that education, healthcare, business, or any other industry in rural areas should settle for fewer resources and opportunities or accept lower standards. This chapter in the nearly 200-year-old institution’s history marks a series of significant strides forward to embrace the definition.
From almost anywhere on campus – whether a sleek new athletic facility, a renovated and relocated historic chapel, miles of sprawling nature trails—visual reminders of what makes the University of West Alabama’s campus unique are unmistakable. Flowing fields flank the busy thoroughfare that connects the north and south ends of campus, which spans more than 600 acres of ground.
Tiger Stadium’s south end zone sits less than a half mile from a bend in the Sucarnochee River, the 50-mile coastal-plain waterway that connects to the Tombigbee River. A labyrinth of canopied nature trails flanks Wallace Hall. Tartt Field is perched on a bank of Lake LU, the 54-acre fishing paradise that regularly gives up record-sized bass. And near the campus’ center, not far from a row of dormitories, is the Alamuchee-Bellamy Covered Bridge, a Sumter County Civil War-era relic relocated decades ago to the campus duck pond.
Visually, geographically and culturally, UWA is inseparable from the ruralness it shares with Livingston, the county seat whose population has never topped 4,000.
A regional state university in Alabama’s historic Black Belt, bearing the label ‘rural university’ is an acknowledgement administration and faculty no longer avoid or downplay. Instead, they’re leaning into the notion and turning a once-perceived negative into a national brand that’s assuming a significant role in modernizing higher education in rural America.
“It’s okay to be unique, and it’s okay to embrace what you are—not just embrace it, but let it shine,” said Dr. Mary Hanks, chair of the University of West Alabama’s Ira D. Pruitt Division of Nursing. Her office, on the third floor of Spieth Hall, is a stone’s throw from the Covered Bridge. “You have to excel in who and what you are. So, yes, we should let the world know exactly who we are. We are rural and we love it. But this is why we love being rural: These are the students we produce, rural is not negative, rural is positive.”
The decision to rehabilitate UWA’s rural label into an academic tool for growth was “very intentional, very conscious,” said UWA President Dr. Ken Tucker, one that campus leaders largely supported from day one. “I think people understood the need to try to turn a perceived negative into a positive, and they understood that there was a potential untapped market out there.” In 2023, UWA features a smorgasbord of academic disciplines and administrative offices designed to educate leaders for rural communities and improve the lives of rural residents. Instead of hiding from the label, UWA is running toward it.
“I’m proud of the fact that we have been at the forefront of that,” Tucker said. “We are on the front end of it, we have made connections nationally with major rural organizations and they have helped us spread the word about rural education.”
A wide collection of UWA administrators is quick to credit Tucker, the university’s former dean of the College of Business, for issuing what they describe as a campus-wide charge to embrace UWA’s ruralness and jettison old habits of trying, and failing, to shroud the obvious. Tucker, from Demopolis, became UWA’s 12th president in January 2015.
“Within the last decade, there’s been a movement across the nation to really embrace rural,” said Dr. Jan Miller, dean of UWA’s College of Education. “But Dr. Tucker has really challenged us to step up, and that’s what makes us unique, what makes us different.”
Hanks mentions one of UWA’s familiar marketing slogans, “There’s Something About This Place.” It’s pertinent, she believes, in how the university relates to the students and faculty it recruits. “There’s something about the personality of the person that has to be drawn here. You have to be drawn to a familial type setting where you want the interaction, you want the camaraderie, you want to be able to collaborate. There’s definitely something different about the makeup of these students and the makeup of the faculty teaching here.”
Doubling Down On Rural Education
The result is a double-pronged approach that equates to burning both ends of a candle, one academic, the other economic. It’s holistic by design. Foremost are the degree programs and scholarship awards now in the university’s catalog that are designed for rural applications or students from rural communities, or both.
“To me, the overarching mission is to serve the region,” Hanks said, looking from the lens of equipping the healthcare industry with registered nurses and BSNs. “We have maintained that we are going to serve our region and we are going to serve the needs of our community.” To that end, UWA’s administration and faculty have aggressively developed new degree programs that follow Tucker’s charge.
In embracing its rural label, administrators and faculty say, UWA is developing a national reputation for tailoring programs for rural-based students and using its Black Belt location as more than a mailing address.
“I really think we’re trying to embrace rural and celebrate that because there are so many advantages to that,” said Miller, who also is a board member of the Rural Schools Collaborative, another UWA partner. “We can be as innovative as we want to be. What’s awesome is to be able to go and say, ‘Okay, I want to pitch this idea, and you can shoot it down or we can mold it and think about it.’ We don’t really close doors and we partner with just about anybody who is willing to partner.”
An Intentional Intertwining of UWA’s Roles
By the simplest definition, UWA is a public regional university whose core duty is to educate students, generations of whom have flocked to the Livingston campus for nearly 200 years. But Dr. Tina Jones, UWA’s new provost and a longtime faculty member who also served as vice president for economic and workforce development, has been deeply involved in the other end of that figurative candle, the one designed to assist local- and state-level entities with job recruitment, worker training and boosting the region’s economic outlook.
“We’re not just an institution of the Black Belt,” Jones said. “We are an institution who is rurally located, and the issues that we encounter are also issues that other communities, other regions even, encounter. There is this opportunity in which we may be able to share and learn from each other.” Tucker, from his second-floor office in Webb Hall, looks inward when mentioning UWA’s role with University Charter School, which opened in 2018 in Lyon Hall on the UWA campus, with the goal of revamping K-12 public education in Sumter County. “In order for the university to grow and complete our mission,” he said, “we need our area to grow and develop.”
In May 2023, UCS graduated its first senior class after adding grades 9, 10, 11, and 12 in subsequent years after opening. In August, UCS cut the ribbon and welcomed its fourth through twelfth grade students to a new $25-million facility. The new Justin L. Smith Campus of UCS is located on the north end of UWA’s Wise Loop, named for the late Smith, a Sumter native and UWA graduate who championed its establishment as a member of UWA’s Board of Trustees.
“We opened UCS with an enrollment of 304 in 2018 recognizing that there was an immediate need for the choice that the school provides,” said Dr. J.J. Wedgworth, UCS head of school. “Now, expanding into our new facility and serving an enrollment of 700, we can say with confidence that we are meeting a need for our county.”
Wedgworth, who became interim vice president for institutional advancement for UWA in March, says the need extends beyond the current population of Sumter County in that it supports recruitment and retention for UWA employees, for employees of prospective businesses and industries looking at Sumter County or west Alabama, and as a uniquely-convenient opportunity for UWA students who will pursue careers in education.
Sumter County’s rural reality is never far from UWA’s discussions. The county’s poverty, median household income and per-capita income levels pale in comparison to state averages. Just prior to the pandemic, Sumter County’s total employment level dropped more than six percent in 2019-2020, according to Census data. Amid those trends, myriad departments at UWA are playing tangible roles in lessening the economic hardships in Sumter County and the Black Belt at large.
In the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, Jones, economic developer Allison Brantley, and their colleagues offer an encyclopedic list of services that mirror Chamber of Commerce duties: professional support for new or expanding business site selection; workforce training programs through the university’s Center for Workforce Development; training and recruitment programs; research and grant support; and liaison services between business owners and government representatives. Successes are common, both small and sizeable. In 2019, Sumter County celebrated its selection as the site of a $375 million Enviva wood-pellet production plant in Epes that promised to create nearly 350 direct and indirect jobs. Along with state and local officials, UWA played an essential role in recruiting the Maryland-based company to Sumter County. At the June 2023 groundbreaking, Enviva CEO Thomas Meth announced that the facility would be the largest of its type in the world.
Because UWA is among the county’s largest and most stable employers, Jones said, “we have a commitment to the community in which we live. That is what we are doing. We are fulfilling our responsibility as a good neighbor.” In blunt terms, administrators say, these economic-development duties come with the job of working at a rural university in one of the nation’s most impoverished areas. “It means that we play some roles that other institutions of higher ed probably would never even think about doing,” Jones said.
In UWA’s Office of Sponsored Programs and Research, it’s not unusual for director Rodney Granec to field a request from a Black Belt town or county for assistance. Some need help writing a grant, a fundamental service of Granec’s office. Others are unsure how to establish a nonprofit. City administrators request his expertise on a variety of matters. It’s not a direct objective of UWA’s core mission—educating students—Granec admits, though he believes it helps the University in other matters. “For most rural communities, collaboration is not a choice,” he said, “it is an essential tool for sustainability. I kind of put that in with rural education. Rural education is a key component for that community, area and region to thrive, or to even have an opportunity to thrive.”
Just as UWA can’t separate itself from its rural location, UWA’s economic development efforts can’t—and shouldn’t—be viewed wholly apart from its core academic mission, Tucker noted. The intertwining is intentional.
“It’s the old ‘rising tide lifts all boats’ concept,” he said. “The more (economic development) we can bring in, that’s more tax revenue for the city and the county. The more services they can provide, the more job opportunities and higher wages with better benefits we’ll have. That brings us more students, too. As more families move in to work at a big plant, they will bring children with them, and when they graduate from high school, we will be here for them. So that’s all part of the larger vision.”
UWA’s Students, And Getting More Of Them
One of higher education’s shared traits is the nationwide decline in college enrollment, which in spring 2022 dipped 4.1 percent below spring 2021 numbers, according to a National Student Clearinghouse Research Center report. It’s a trend with multiple contributors, from the pandemic to economic concerns, from job opportunities that don’t require a four-year degree to the burden of repaying college loans.
According to data from the National Center for Education Data Statistics, overall college enrollment nationwide peaked in 2010 at 21 million. Undergraduate enrollment in the nation peaked in 2015 at 3.2 million, declining slightly through 2020, then COVID-19 sent shockwaves through the college landscape. UWA was among only seven percent of public universities in the nation to maintain elements of the in-person college experience at the onset of the pandemic, with classes resuming in the fall of 2020 after coming to a screeching halt near the end of the spring semester. The aftermath of the pandemic includes a dramatic shift in lifestyles, financial ability, and changes in the workforce prompted by virtual capabilities and marketplace needs.
Amidst the nationwide decline in college enrollment, UWA isn’t immune. Although on-campus enrollment numbers mirror the Black Belt’s depopulation trend as indicated by the Census, more than 4,500 students, many from outside the University’s traditional recruiting areas, are enrolled in UWA’s expanding catalog of online programs.
Libba Baker, UWA’s director of undergraduate admissions, needs no reminder of those national trends. “It’s harder to recruit students across the board right now,” she said. “They have so many options at their fingertips.” But Baker hasn’t lowered her expectations for UWA’s ability to recruit students interested in a quality, four-year degree from a rural university deep in the heart of west Alabama. Her voice bubbles with optimism.
Not every university is for every student, she says. On that note, UWA isn’t different from Ivy League schools or faith-based private universities. Fit matters.
“I think a lot of times the rural label may scare some of our potential students, especially if they are coming from a more metropolitan area,” Baker said. “So it’s our job to inform our admissions counselors on the happenings not only on campus, but we’ve also got to know what’s going on around Livingston so students know the options once they get here.”
UWA has four admissions counselors dedicated to recruiting high school students; another concentrates on transfer students. The messages they deliver, Baker said, are rooted in honesty so students and their families make informed decisions that court success. Put another way, UWA’s admissions director doesn’t want to mislead prospective students about the realities of rural education. Livingston isn’t Birmingham. “We don’t want to sell something that we are clearly not and that we will never be,” she said, “but show them who we are in the most authentic way.”
In other words, UWA’s admissions counselors use the university’s ruralness as a positive, not as an ignorable negative. Prefer smaller class sizes? UWA has that. Enjoy ample communication with faculty? UWA has that. (At UWA, Tucker said, “the professors will know the students’ names.”) Appreciate the outdoors and a campus landscaped with lakes and walking trails? UWA is surrounded by it. Interested in curriculum designed for post-graduation success in rural communities? UWA has that, too, along with renowned degree programs in other fields that belie the university’s physical stature.
Hanks emphasizes needs of students from small cities or those more comfortable on smaller campuses. When they attend larger universities, they are trying to fit “their square into the circle … They feel out of place, so they cannot find their bearing and they don’t know why. You’re trying to fit your square into the circle, and you should have been in a place that fits your personality.”
New high school graduates, Baker said, often mold their college expectations from what they see on television. Those expectations can cloud decisions and fuel what Hanks’ refers to in her square-and-circle description. A goal of UWA’s admissions counselors is to sell the university and its range of amenities while also helping students with one of the most important decisions of their lives.
“We’re in higher education because we want to support students, for them to get their associate, bachelor, master, or doctoral degrees so that they can get a job and be employed,” Baker said. “It is important to know our student population and what may be the best fit for the students. And if it is UWA, that’s fantastic.”
UWA’s Story, Then And Now
At the heart of a rural university’s reality is public perception. It’s sticky, like molasses, hard to shed. Marketing campaigns don’t offer guaranteed improvements in how a university is viewed. In UWA’s case, human nature’s inherent tendency to equate “rural” with “deficient” is core to a central belief: that UWA and its kindred universities must control their narratives and change the public’s understanding of what rural education can be.
“People seem to think, ‘Oh, poor, pitiful, ‘rural’ can’t do any better,’ until they actually come into the campus and walk in our shoes and see,” said Miller, who has more than a fair share of regional and national partners with the College of Education. “They’ll say, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is the best kept secret.’ So I think the rural context is part of telling our stories. Our successes follow our students, but for forever, rural would be considered at risk, and that’s not the case. We have a lot of stories yet to be told.”
Hanks, the nursing school chair, decries what she calls the “negative connotations” associated with rural America, not rural education alone. The tendency to view bigger as better, and rural as an oppressive codeword, is hard to dissolve. “But the only way you change the narrative is to rewrite the story,” she said. “So I think that UWA and other rural institutions, we have a great opportunity to rewrite the narrative.”
In Livingston, UWA’s modern narrative isn’t substantially different than those of its past. The region, Tucker says, “is still primarily agriculture, farming, timber, cattle, catfish, and that’s great if you like woods and hunting and fishing. A lot of people do.” The regional makeup of the student body is profound. The decision to steer into the skid, to neutralize rural education’s harshest critics through rural-based degree programs and regional economic-development efforts, is one UWA’s administrators are glad they made. Championing a campus lush in green space and natural habitat is the easy part.
“But that’s the kind of people we have to appeal to, clean air, slower lifestyle where relationships matter and people take care of each other,” Tucker said. “Our students have more opportunities to develop the kind of skills and ability and knowledge that will make them successful, not only while they’re here, but also in the real world when they get out.”
UWA is reimagining rural.
