First: Imagine being in charge of a college that serves a student body that extends across 26,000 square miles of the desert Southwest.
Diné College was established by the Navajo Nation in 1968, the very first tribally controlled and accredited collegiate institution in the country. Today it has grown to serve well over 1300 students, who typically might attend class at the college’s main campus in Tsaile, Arizona, or opt instead to go to one of the college’s five satellite campuses (in Chinle, AZ, Tuba City, AZ, Window Rock, AZ, Crownpoint, New Mexico or Shiprock, NM).
Next: Imagine operating and maintaining all of those farflung facilities in the extreme desert climate.
As the very first tribal college to be founded, Diné College was accorded its own enabling act by Congress in the early 1970s. The legislation authorizes the college to receive federal funding for Operations and Management (O&M), and over the years that legislation has been renewed repeatedly. But there’s a big difference between authorization and appropriation, and that’s where the problem lies. This mandate has never been funded, so as maintenance needs have piled up, the College has had to borrow from other funds to address the problems.
Now: Imagine having to pivot almost overnight to online instruction during the pandemic.
This is a condition that many of us can relate to on a certain level, but in the case of Diné College, this transition meant having to figure out a way to reach those 1300-plus students who were scattered across those 26,000 miles of desert.
These are the kinds of challenges that Diné College president Dr. Charles “Monty” Roessel (Navajo) has been facing on a regular basis.
But in a recent interview, Roessel talked about how, oddly enough, the COVID-19 crisis has created opportunities that seemed out of reach before. The recent rounds of pandemic-related relief funding have provided the College with unprecedented infusions of cash – and it’s been eye-opening.
“Prior to the pandemic we limited ourselves because we just couldn’t do certain things, “ Roessel said. “But the funding has allowed us to take the shackles off, if you will, and to think of solutions and not just bandaids.”
For starters, the College used the relief funding it received to implement a digital transformation on campus.
“Many of our processes were still done by paper,” Roessel said. “So what a lot of colleges have taken for granted, we haven’t had the money to make that transition. But this funding has allowed us to make a jump into the future… it’s changing the way we do business.”
The transformation affected not only recordkeeping, but also instruction. The College has been able not only to offer online classes, but to think about creating online degree programs. They’ve even begun developing what will be the college’s first graduate degree program, an online MBA, which the college hopes to get approved as early as next spring.