President Rule Wraps up his First Year on Campus

Dave Rule

Dave Rule spent the past twelve months acclimating himself to his new role as Bellevue College’s ninth president. As he prepares for his second year on the job, the father of three sat down with us to let us in on a bit more about his plans for the future and what makes the man on the motorcycle

Q: What does being president of BC mean to you?
It means being extremely humbled and honored. Really, this is a dream job: Bellevue College is a destination college for someone in my position. It is the recognized flagship of the Washington State Community and Technical Colleges (CTC) system: we’re the largest; we’re known for our innovation; our willingness to be entrepreneurial. To have been selected to serve as its leader is just amazing.

President Rule at Veteran's monument ceremony
President Rule spoke at the unveiling ceremony of BC’s new Veteran’s monument.

Q: As what type of leader do you see yourself?
I tend to be a participatory leader. I’m perfectly comfortable with the fact that I don’t know all the answers; I don’t need to have all the answers myself. One of the great things about working in a college is that we have an amazingly educated, talented faculty and administration, so while I lead, I do so by consensus and tapping into the brain-trust of the staff. No one person has an exclusive and perfect view of the college, so it’s important to gather input from them. I try to be as transparent as possible in my decision-making process. Every college struggles with communication – they’re big, complicated places, and transparency is good for all involved.

Q: What is the BC identity and how do you plan to continue strengthening and cultivating it?
We are entrepreneurial; we were the ones pushing for the baccalaureates; we’re the center for excellence in IT; we have innovative programs; we’re the largest transfer institution to UW. So part of my task is to continue that tradition and explore what that means for the future. As we struggle appropriately with questions of our identity, we have to examine, what does it mean now that we are accredited as a four-year school? What role will we play in the local community? How will our programming adapt to the community’s needs for four-year programming and associate degrees? What does the future hold for us as a residence college? We are a college in transition. And so my task, as I see it, is to move us into the future. The future is an undiscovered country and that’s what makes it so exciting!

Q: How have you and how will you continue to engage with the BC community?
I spend as much time as I can walking around the campus. I build in time to my schedule to walk around one building per day. I also like to sit out on the benches on campus, weather permitting, to get a sense of what is going on and meet people. I am a guest lecturer in classes as well. The office of the presidency can be a trap – this is my third time as a president and I know how the office can just suck you in, so I hold regular office hours in the faculty commons. I also eat in the cafeteria with the students. Students are the reason we exist and I find they will tell me what is on their minds. You get an honest and unfiltered viewpoint from them and I really appreciate that. Off campus, I am involved with Rotary, several chamber boards, and I attend as many community events as my schedule will allow. Really, as much as is humanly possible, I try to get out there.

Q: What are your plans for the next year?
The primary goal for the upcoming year is for us to take the time to chart a course for our future. Bellevue College is going to celebrate 50 years of service to our district and the greater Puget Sound in 2016 and now is the time for us to pause and decide where we want to go as an institution. We are developing our very first strategic, academic and student plans that are both individual and integrated with one another. As we plan for our 50th birthday, we must also work towards building a foundation and reaching out to the community. I am often told that Bellevue College is the best-kept secret, and part of my task is to change that – I don’t want to be the best-kept secret anymore; we need and must have a more outward focus.

Q: Where would you like to see BC in 5, 10, 15 years from now?
I would love to see Bellevue College becoming the premiere, urban two-plus-four-year college in the nation: Open enrollment, residencies, offering a full-array of associate and baccalaureate degrees – really meeting the needs of our community and being known for academic excellence, retention, graduation, transfer rates, and employment rates. I would love to find ourselves in a situation where we have too many requests from other colleges and universities wanting to come to Bellevue to figure out our secret sauce.

Q: What’s the importance of the relationship that BC enjoys with Bellevue and the Puget Sound region?
We have a stellar reputation. Whenever I am out in the community, whether it be in Bellevue, Issaquah, within the district, in Seattle, or anywhere in the state, everyone knows about Bellevue College and everyone speaks with the highest regard for Bellevue College. In that respect, the task for myself and the college is to acknowledge that place of leadership and to utilize these positive relationships and sentiments that people have about Bellevue College to help us really grow into this vision that we are all participating in. We need to use this to strengthen our partnerships with business and municipalities. I just came back from a week-long trade mission with the governor’s staff to China, and I think that’s a perfect example of how the college can step into that leadership role.

Q: What do you see as the potential of Bellevue and the Eastside?
One of the questions I am asked is why Bellevue dropped the word community from its title. Even though we dropped that word from the college’s name as a means of announcing our accreditation as a four-year school, we’re still a part of the CTC system and we are still the community’s college. Our trustees are selected by the governor from our local community and the college’s move toward offering four-year degrees, toward becoming a residence college, is directly tied to the community’s demand. Aside from the flagship university (UW) there is no other public four-year college in the greater Seattle-metro area. So, when I look at the eastside, we are responding to our community’s need for a four-year college. Accredited degrees are a requirement for entry into a majority of career fields. We are who we are because the community needs us to be this.

Q: What’s the status of baccalaureate degrees?
Our five, almost six baccalaureate degrees are coming out of their infancy and the academic master planning that is currently underway will provide us greater detail as to what specific areas may end up with a BA program in the future. Generally speaking, the college is known for its information technology – we are the state’s center for info tech; we have strength in biology, computing, and environmental science. Whatever direction we choose to go for future bachelor degree offerings, we will certainly leverage our current strengths. We will, however bear in mind that we are a member of the Community and Technical Colleges system and as such, we remain ever mindful of our counterparts and the areas of study in which they excel. It allows us the freedom to concentrate on our own strengths.

Q: How do you imagine continuing and strengthening the momentum that BC has achieved in the past decade?
Campus-wide discussions such as the academic and strategic planning currently underway are helping to ensure that we keep a keen focus on our commitment to excellence in academics, social justice and diversity as well as our mission to remain nimble in our response to community needs. One of the things that any college has to be mindful of is losing its focus of who it is and where it wants to go. We don’t want to personify the expression of a mile-wide and an inch-deep! One of my hopes for the current academic year with all this planning is to really focus and build consensus around our direction as an institution. I like to use the analogy of a compass heading: We’re not necessarily a career-focused school – a school that only does, say health professions and of the health professions, specializes in imaging – we’re broader than that. But at the same time, a danger can be trying to be all things to all people. If you don’t know where you’re going, all roads lead there. So we need that compass heading.

Q: What successes at BC are you the most proud of?
I’ve only been here a year! I am standing on the shoulders of the great women before me! I look out the window and I see the science and technology building going up. I see the science building that we have now; the acquisition of land to consider better-serving our eastside residents; the move into the baccalaureates and the desire to expand that part of our mission. The truly forward-looking leadership that this college has had from the faculty and the administration is what drew me here! I came from a place where I was a part of one of the largest community colleges in the nation – 95k students and growing – it took a place like Bellevue to pull me out of that, because Bellevue’s reputation, future-orientation, the amazing quality of the faculty and the quality of the leadership is second-to-none!

Q: What do you see as the biggest misconception about BC and how do you address it?
We are now an accredited, four-year school, but there’s this misconception that people have of what that means institutionally. Yes, we offer baccalaureate degrees, but we still offer the excellent associates degree programming and continuing education we did before. We may have changed our name, but we’re still a part of the Community and Technical Colleges system. Also, there’s a misconception about the speed with which we can respond to various needs. We are an academic institution, and because of that, it takes time to work through our development process. It takes appropriate time, granted it’s at warp-8 compared to the large universities! A great example of this is the possibility of building dorms on campus: the fastest I could ever envision dorms with students in them is three years out. To our neighbors, this seems very slow, but it will take us a year alone to answer the critical questions: what do they look like? What will the student population be? How much should they cost?

President rule with his motorcycle
Motorcycle riding is President Rule’s long time passion.

Q: What do you like to do in your down time?
I’m married with three children – I don’t have any down time! I have two boys, 13 and 15 and a daughter who’s 11. My first priority is my family: Running my eldest son to his fencing lessons and tournaments, or working with my middle son on his speeches for his debate team, or running my daughter around to American Girl doll stores or soccer games. My children have grown up on college campuses – this is all they’ve ever known – their dad being a college president for the most part.

I’ve been motorcycling since the day after I received my driver’s license: I got my car license on my 16th birthday and I showed up the next day and got my motorcycle license. My wife rides as well. I didn’t get as many rides in this summer as I usually do since my family moved up from Portland this summer. So the only real trip I was able to get in was with a friend from Portland – we rode a lap of the Olympic Peninsula in September. Serving as a college president in various parts of the country I’ve been to Maine, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, and the Upper Peninsula of Michigan via motorcycle. I ride year round here – the rain shovels easy! I’m from upstate New York and Michigan, where by now I would have put the motorcycles in a storage bin somewhere. Obviously I don’t ride as much this time of year here, but I have waterproof gear.

Q: What about you might surprise people?
I ride motorcycles, have pierced ears, have tattoos – just two at the moment, but my children think I should get another one. I like turtles, partly for the symbolism: longevity, wisdom… but my favorite turtle is Crush from Finding Nemo and my boys have decided I should have Crush as a tattoo. I’m not sure my wife would appreciate that one.
I never planned on being a college professor or president – that just sort of happened. People ask me how I ended up in my career trajectory and I have to tell them that they give me way too much credit: I changed majors several times. If you were to ask my friends from high school, they’d say, “Dave? A college president?!” They elected me class president as a joke… little did they know!

– by Evan Epstein

Last Updated October 3, 2016