Remembering Former TCC President Dr. Ray Needham
Former TCC President Dr. Raymond “Ray” Needham has passed at the age of 92 in Gold Canyon, Arizona, where resided for several years. Memorial information is posted in The News Tribune’s Obituary.
Needham served as Tacoma Community College President from 1990 – 1997. But his association with the college goes back to the very beginning.
Planning a Pair of Colleges
Up in Auburn, Needham and Dr. Mel Lindbloom were planning the college that would become Green River Community College. Needham and Lindbloom learned that Dr. Thornton “Tom” Ford and John Terry were putting together plans for a community college in Tacoma. Both Tacoma and Auburn got approval from the State Legislature to open community colleges in 1965, and the two teams decided to plan the colleges together.
“For about two years, the four of us were meeting at the Poodle Dog in Fife,” Needham said in his TCC 50th Anniversary interview in 2013. “We showed them the plans for Green River and they showed us the plans for Tacoma Community College.”
Needham remembered that when he visited the TCC site in 1964, there wasn’t much here – not even trees -- but there was an airport across the street. When TCC and Green River opened in 1965, Needham served as Green River’s Vice President and Dean of Instruction. Both he and Lindbloom would later serve as President of TCC.
A Career in Education
Born in Whatcom County, Needham graduated from Ferndale High School. He financed his college education mostly through selling the cattle he’d raised – his personal herd was up to 15 cows by the time he was a senior – and working on a commercial fishing boat off Lummi Island during the summers. He went to Washington State University on a partial wrestling scholarship, completed WSU’s Agricultural program, and joined the U.S. Army Signal Corps, attaining the rank of First Lieutenant. He then spent six years as a high school vocational Agriculture teacher, wrestling coach, and football coach before moving into higher education. Along the way he married and had four children.
Needham enjoyed teaching, but he thought he could improve on the work the principal of the school where he taught was doing, so he returned to WSU for a master’s degree in Education Administration, then went on to earn a PhD in College Administration from Colorado State. His dissertation dealt with the question of how a community should decide when the time is right to start a vocational-technical program.
Needham would later put his model into practice at Guilford Technical Community College in North Carolina. It was a technical college when he arrived, and Needham launched 19 new technical programs during his decade at Guilford. But he also insisted that technical college students needed transfer opportunities. Despite opposition from the state’s four-year colleges, he got North Carolina to pass legislation allowing technical schools to become community colleges offering transfer programs.
“I had a really strong feeling that students who might be in the technical area, might someday want to be an engineer and want to use their transfer courses.”
A TCC Legacy
Including the years he spent planning Green River, Needham spent about a decade at each of the institutions he led. Before he arrived at TCC he was a founder and Dean of Instruction at Green River from 1962 – 1970, President of Linn-Benton Community College in Albany, Oregon from 1970 – 1980, and President of Guilford Technical Community College in Jamestown, North Carolina from 1980 – 1990.
Needham accepted the President’s job at TCC in 1990, just as the statewide Running Start program was getting started. During his time at TCC Needham led the movement to persuade the State Legislature to remove the community college enrollment caps they’d imposed during the early 1980s. He also championed cultural diversity, digital literacy, better teacher pay and more full-time faculty positions.
Needham’s TCC legacy includes building the Gig Harbor Campus and linking buildings via the college’s first LAN-based data communications network. He felt that building the TCC Gig Harbor Campus was one of his greatest accomplishments while at TCC. But he spent most of his energy on things that are more difficult to quantify: Building relationships with faculty, staff, and students, community leaders and businesses, legislators, alumni, and other colleges. He was happy to be able to focus on building relationships after so many years spent building campuses, as he did at Green River, Linn Benton, and North Carolina.
“It was a nice situation, because I didn’t have quite the turmoil of the other three schools.”
A Lifetime of Achievement
In 1997, Needham received the Earl Norman Leadership Award from the Washington Association of Community College Administrators. It wasn’t just the lifetime achievement award that was special to Needham, it was the fact that Earl Norman had been the first Dean of Students at Green River Community College and one of his best friends before he passed.
Asked about the future of community colleges, Needham expressed a hope that community colleges will resist the temptation to stray too far from their original mission.
“Their goals are sound,” Needham said. “I think the community college movement in the United States was a great movement. I was excited to be part of it.”