Alena Selezneva
Imagine this: You have a community college with an elected board of five people who know exactly zip about higher education. A few of them are right-wing nuts who want to save society from the evils of encroaching wokeness and in trying to do so managed to bring an institution to its knees.
No matter that the mission of the place is to teach welding and basic math, to train police and machinists in a resort town. North Idaho College in Coeur d’Alene offers more than 150 degrees and certificates, alongside transfer and general education courses.
In September 2021, the trustees fired the president. In October, the merry pranksters voted 3 to 2 to put the wrestling coach in the job as interim.
In June 2022, they hired a guy who looked kinda right—well, to some of them—because he was literally a good soldier. Nick Swayne, a 26-year Army veteran, had done good things at a four-year university in Virginia and was ready to return to his home state.
He started in August 2022. But not everyone liked this straight-backed, straight-talking guy. Swayne had raised concerns about board actions, open-records and procurement practices, and the college’s financial and accreditation risk. Four months after he started, he was placed on leave. The board brought in a tennis coach with a list of short-term higher ed gigs as interim president.
Swayne hired a lawyer and sued. A judge eventually found that the trustees had violated his employment contract, ordered his permanent reinstatement and called the purported investigation used to remove him “a sham and pretext.” Even with buyout offers, the military dude would not stand down.
So many tales of board behavior are in the you-can’t-make-this-shit-up category, but the story of the community college on the banks of a deep mountain lake in a lovely resort town in a bloodred state might win the gold medal for wackadoodle. Since I’m only half an hour away, I read the news with shock and heard firsthand accounts from friends who taught there. It has been well documented, perhaps best in—get ready for this—Teen Vogue.
I was excited to meet Nick Swayne when I was invited to speak at a conference hosted at his institution for other community college leaders this summer. Just a few weeks out of surgery, he attended the first night’s dinner, which I had to skip, then Swayne missed the conference. He had bled through his stitches. “It didn’t hurt,” he said over lunch a couple of weeks later, about the 11-inch incision made to correct a hip replacement done 20 years ago.
When I commented that he may not have had the easiest presidency, he said, “I only travel on gravel.” A career in the military taught him to tough it out, to never show weakness and know how to handle bad bosses. It also left him with a desire for cool shoes, he confessed over lunch: “In the military, you get to wear one pair of boots and one pair of shoes.”
He’d gone into higher ed as a second career and, at James Madison University, brought a nonacademic approach to learning. He founded JMU X-Labs, a place where students, faculty and community members work across disciplines to solve real problems. The model combines interdisciplinary, project-based work and design thinking, asking students to take on complicated public challenges—among them environmental problems and the opioid crisis—rather than simply mastering a prescribed body of information.
We all know that students check out of gen-ed courses where they are forced to memorize information, are told there are right answers and cheat because they really don’t give two hoots about the subject. Swayne told me that the A students often freaked out: “They just wanted to know what they needed to do to get a good grade and tended to drop out. The B and C students? They thrived.” And in the process, he said, they became A students who were then able to translate what they had learned into good jobs. This kind of hands-on approach to education made him a good candidate to lead a community college.
In other words, and in my opinion, NIC was darned lucky to get Swayne. When he arrived, the college was already under an accreditor’s warning because of leadership and governance failures. The Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities had determined in early 2022 that the college’s board was dysfunctional; after the board turmoil intensified, the commission escalated NIC to show cause status in February 2023—the last stop before possible loss of accreditation. The accreditation chronology is laid out here.
At a dinner with Swayne and his comrade in arms Lloyd Duman, who had been at NIC for more than 30 years and served as provost, they told me stories of threats that gave me the shivers. Their wives added reminders of the toll these jobs can take on families. What I’d read in the news coverage, which was National Enquirer–level wacko, with one trustee responding to a news article about why she didn’t file a police report when a fellow trustee threatened her—after he had in fact physically assaulted a female employee of the college—seemed tame compared to what I heard in our off-the-record conversation.
Coeur d’Alene is a destination location, a beautiful place with a history you can’t ignore. At least, I can’t. Kootenai County was the longtime home of the Aryan Nations compound, established by Richard Butler as a center of white-nationalist organizing. North Idaho College’s own Human Rights Collection documents that history. And lest we forget, we have reminders: In 2022, police arrested 31 people believed to be affiliated with the white-nationalist group Patriot Front near a Coeur d’Alene Pride event, on conspiracy-to-riot charges. Then, in 2024, members of the visiting University of Utah women’s basketball team reported being subjected to racist slurs and harassment while in Coeur d’Alene for the NCAA tournament.
In terms of higher education, the insanity that brought North Idaho College close to losing accreditation was one of the canaries in the coal mine of the red-state legislative takeover of higher ed. At the same time we watched this nuttiness, we were also tuned in to what was going on at New College in Florida.
But now, after four years of what most of us would consider hell, Nick Swayne is finally able to do the things he wanted to when he took the job back in his native state. In February, NIC was returned to good standing by its accreditor, after years of warning, show cause and probation. The Northwest Commission said the college had resolved the governance issues associated with the former board and lifted the sanction.
Swayne is focused on workforce readiness, has instituted the NIC Guarantee for jobs and transfer to four-year institutions, and has some exciting ideas about how to leverage the resort setting of the campus. At this point, at least, the board is onboard, with the two trustees up for re-election running unopposed in November.
I guess you can get places if you learn how to travel on gravel.
