Bellwater Community College President Dr. Ramon Delgado announced Friday he plans to retire within the year, ending a twelve-year tenure that reshaped the college's two-campus system.
Bellwater Community College President Dr. Ramon Delgado announced Friday he plans to retire within the year, ending a twelve-year tenure in which he built the college’s two-campus system into what regional economists frequently cite as the city’s most direct pipeline out of poverty.
Delgado, 66, told the college’s board of trustees he intended to stay through the end of the academic year to oversee the early stages of a $28 million expansion of the West Bellwater campus, approved by the board earlier this year, before formally stepping down.
A tenure built around one bet
“When I started here, this college was mostly seen as a stopping point on the way to somewhere else,” Delgado said. “I wanted it to become the somewhere else. I think for a lot of students now, it is.”
Delgado is widely credited with building the college’s transfer partnership with Bellwater State University, which allows community college students to move directly into four-year programs, including the university’s biomanufacturing bachelor’s degree, without losing credits. Dr. Samuel Iyer, the Bellwater State labor economist who has tracked the region’s workforce trends throughout Delgado’s tenure, called the partnership “the single most important piece of workforce infrastructure this region built in the last decade that didn’t require pouring concrete,” and has tracked its impact in his annual skills-gap report for years.
Board of Trustees Chair Herbert Lowe said Delgado’s departure would leave a significant leadership gap, particularly given the timing relative to the West Bellwater expansion. “Ramon is walking away right as the hardest part of this expansion begins,” Lowe said. “That’s not lost on any of us, and it’s part of why we asked him to stay through the current academic year rather than leave immediately.”
A pipeline still catching up to demand
Delgado’s tenure has not been without frustration. He has said publicly, including in comments last year, that the college’s green-energy manufacturing certificate programs continue to graduate fewer students than regional employers say they need, a gap he described as the most persistent disappointment of his time leading the college. He said he hoped his successor would continue pushing to close that gap rather than treat the West Bellwater expansion as a finish line.
I’m proud of what this college became, but I want to be honest that we are still behind where the employers in this city need us to be. Whoever comes after me inherits a much better set of tools than I started with, but not a finished job. Nowhere close.
Dr. Ramon Delgado, President, Bellwater Community College
Delgado’s announcement drew tributes from several city officials, including Council Member Denise Okafor, whose West Bellwater district includes the community college’s second campus. “I’ve never once had to convince Ramon that West Bellwater mattered as much as the downtown campus,” Okafor said. “He believed that before most of the rest of the city did.”
The board plans to launch a formal national search for Delgado’s successor in the coming weeks, with Lowe saying the college hopes to have a new president in place before Delgado’s planned departure to allow for a transition period. Delgado said he intends to remain available to the college in an advisory capacity after his retirement, particularly through the early stages of the West Bellwater expansion.
Delgado said he had no immediate plans beyond retirement, joking that he intended to spend more time at the Vale Avenue Farmers Market on weekday mornings, something his schedule had rarely allowed. He said his primary hope for his successor was continuity on the college’s partnership work with both Bellwater State and the region’s manufacturers, rather than a change in direction.
Delgado came to Bellwater Community College after two decades in community college administration in another state, arriving at a time when the college’s enrollment had been declining for several consecutive years and its two-campus structure was viewed by some trustees as an inefficient duplication of effort rather than an asset. He said reversing that internal skepticism about the West Bellwater campus specifically was among the accomplishments he was proudest of, ahead of the enrollment gains that followed.
Faculty at the college said Delgado’s departure would be felt most in the relationships he had personally built with regional employers, many of which predated formal partnership agreements. “Ramon would just show up at a manufacturer’s office and ask what they needed, before there was any contract or program attached to it,” said one longtime faculty member in the college’s workforce-training division. “Whoever comes next is going to have to earn that kind of trust from scratch with some of these employers.”
Lowe said the board intends to ask Delgado to help brief finalist candidates during the search process, hoping his institutional knowledge of the college’s employer relationships can ease the transition even though he will not have a formal vote in selecting his successor.