Rocky's Renaissance: The little college that could

Forget carefully scripted and wonky talking points provided by communications specialists. Forget the president looking and acting, well, presidential.

“There are many challenges in my position,” Wilmouth said, “and one of them is I’ve got to act more presidential. Right?”

Well, if it ain’t broke…

And one thing for sure is that Rocky, the Little College That Could, ain’t broke -- literally or figuratively. Since Wilmouth took the reins in April 2013, after five years as head of Rocky’s Master of Physicians Assistant Studies program, a resilient school destroyed twice by earthquakes, and then on the precipice of bankruptcy in the 1980s, is enjoying its headiest days.

Enrollment has surged past 1,000 toward an annual goal of 1,100. The school achieved surplus revenue in 2015-16 for the first time in five years. Reserves are edging toward $1.5 million, with an eye on $2 million. The endowment is at $30 million. Freshman retention is hovering around a satisfying 70 percent.

As part of Rocky’s ambitious “ImpACT Today, Transform Tomorrow” campaign, renovations to the Herb Klindt football stadium are underway -- with lights for night events, an artificial surface allowing for greater community use, and improved seating already in place. Just outside the south end zone, construction has begun on a $15 million science center along Poly Drive that will have a balcony overlooking the football field.

For Wilmouth, who is 60 this year, it’s just a start.

“It’s a good college, maybe a very good college,” he said. “But it could be an exceptional college. We’ve got to dream big. Billings has got to dream big. Why not dream big? And I think that’s starting to happen here.”

The dreaming begins with Wilmouth, a particle of combustible energy whose tenure in academia began only after a life-threatening illness in 2004 forced him to give up heart surgery.

A dedicated sports enthusiast who lives and dies with the New York Jets and Yankees despite growing up in a Chicago suburb, he is likely to show up anywhere at any time and say just about anything to anyone. One day he’ll dine at a high-end restaurant with the state’s top decision-makers, the next he’ll make a lunch date at a sandwich shop with a middle-class alum he’d just met the previous day at a Rocky sporting event. “Like a fart on a skillet,” is how one associate affectionately describes him.

Wilmouth’s vibe has permeated the otherwise pastoral 60-acre campus and stately sandstone buildings, many carved and built with help from students from a quarry beneath the rims beginning in the late 1940s.

“I don’t think trickle down is the right word for it,” said Rocky Athletic Director Bruce Parker, who was hired by Wilmouth in 2014 after an 11-year stint at Carroll College in Helena. “It floods us. We’re bathed in that enthusiasm.”

To fully appreciate Rocky’s recent evolution and revolution, a brief history is in order.

The Presbyterian Church opened the school’s doors in 1878 in Deer Lodge as the Montana Collegiate Institute – the state’s first institution of higher education. After an earthquake forced the college’s closure in 1916, it moved to Helena and merged with the United Methodist Church’s newly-minted Montana Wesleyan College to become Intermountain Union College. A 6.2-magnitude earthquake in 1935 destroyed all but one of the school’s buildings, necessitating the closure of the Helena campus and the merging of Intermountain Union’s assets with the United Church of Christ-affiliated Billings Polytechnic Institute, which had opened in 1908.

Those schools operated side-by-side on what was then rural farmland beneath the rims until 1947, when they became one. In a close student vote, the name Rocky Mountain College was adopted over Yellowstone College because at the time “yellow” was associated with cowardice.

In a state rich in public four-year institutions per capita, the private college lured top-flight faculty, setting the tone for what Wilmouth calls “the sacred relationship of the classroom – which works here.”

Billings was fertile ground for graduates, especially those in the business and geology programs who gravitated toward the oil and gas industry, and today about half of Rocky’s alums remain in the Magic City. The student body, historically in the traditional 18-24 age range, has long been revered in the Billings community and across the state as reflecting grassroots Montana values -- hard-working, responsible, accountable.

Much of the credit for the school’s initial sterling academic reputation is accorded to Lawrence F. Small, who was lured to Montana from Harvard in 1958 to teach history. He was Rocky’s president for 10 years, beginning in 1965.

“There’s a depth within our faculty,” said Brad Nason, a Bozeman native and Rocky alum who hired on briefly after graduation in 1983, returned in 1987 as dean of students and now serves as a jack-of-all-trades vice president and dean for student life. “I’d stack ours up against anybody across the state.”

Despite the early academic success, enrollment struggles – Rocky still had less than 500 students in the late 1970s -- left a trail of budget deficits that peaked at around $4 million in 1987.

At that point, the story goes, interim president James J. Rittenkamp went to the facilities department, asked for a box of keys to campus buildings, marched downtown to First Interstate Bank, dumped the box on a conference room table and issued an ultimatum.

Either help us breathe or the college is all yours.

“I think he got their attention,” Nason recalled. “The debt was just smothering the college and we were quite literally month-to-month. It was hanging by a thread.”

First Interstate forgave half the debt, $2 million. Rocky sold several property parcels south of Poly Drive for development to retire the remainder of the burden. But financial stability wouldn’t truly arrive until 2005 under the temperamental but fiscally-savvy president Michael R. Mace, who had a long history in business development and finance. Within two years, Mace dramatically reduced the debt and increased the endowment, and his leadership led to an enrollment increase of more than 50 percent.

Fast forward to 2017.

“Mace got us out of that financial situation,” Nason said, “and Bob is giving us the opportunity to further that work.”

Wilmouth, who earned his undergraduate degree at Notre Dame and medical degree at the University of Illinois, arrived in Billings to serve as a cardiac, thoracic and vascular surgeon at the Billings Clinic. He concedes to living practically across the street from Rocky for a quarter-century without knowing much about the school except that “it was a liberal arts college that loved sports.”

He had been the clinic’s chief of cardiac services for six years when in 2003 he realized he’d been ignoring chronic bleeding for too long and went down the hall for a checkup. The result: leukemia had metastasized to the bowels, liver and lungs, he said, all exacerbating a relatively common inherited neurological condition called Charcot-Marie-Tooth (CMT).

“I got lucky,” he said. “I had good care in Billings.”

Wilmouth’s surgical career was finished. But after nearly two years of recuperation, Rocky approached him about taking over the PA program and the rest is history. He was asked to apply for the presidency in 2013 and did so because “I can’t say no,” and was given the nod over 53 other applicants.

“I remember telling my wife and she thought I was kidding,” he recalled. “When they called me I said, ‘I’m not even a PA.’ But, I was surprised I was even a heart surgeon, to be honest.”

Wilmouth spent six months assessing the state of the union and admits he forced dramatic change too quickly. Several cabinet members left and three of four he hired in 2014 have departed as well, leaving only Parker, for which Wilmouth accepts much of the responsibility.

“I wanted total world domination for us, and that was a mistake on my part,” he said. “I have a certain style. I’m very demanding, I move quickly, I’m results-oriented. On the other hand, you’ve got to come in and observe how a place works. You can’t just come in and make changes. And if you allow frustration to get to you, that’s going to be a problem.

“I guess I would just say I underestimated the difficulty of the position. But I want it all for this place. I really do.”

Parker, a Billings native and Eastern Montana College (MSUB) alum, recognizes Wilmouth’s desire to set Rocky apart.

“He wants us to be better, wants us to improve, to change. The saying ‘we’ve always done it that way’ is not a good saying at Rocky, and I really do think it starts from the top. We’re aggressive in our fundraising, aggressive with the community. We don’t want to be that sleepy little school in Billings down the street from MSU Billings,” said Parker.

A result of Wilmouth’s learning curve is the board of trustees’ retooling of his role in 2015. He is the man with the long-term 30,000-foot vision, and restructuring has allowed him to emphasize two strengths: fundraising and schmoozing, even if neither are in the comfort zone of a man who insists much of his world had revolved entirely around “my family, my job and sports – the Jets and the Yankees.”

So Wilmouth frequently is seen about town and the state, chatting up donors at cocktail parties in his spendy suits or mingling with rowdy football players at men’s basketball games in the Fortin Center (about one-third of Rocky’s students are athletes), often on the same day.

His message is the same: We’re just beginning. After the science center is complete, he and Nason envision more facility improvements, including major renovations at the Fortin Center and construction of new residence halls. It’s all a continuation of what some are calling a renaissance at Rocky, even if Wilmouth and others are hesitant to go that far.

“To me it doesn’t necessarily feel that way,” Nason said. “It feels like continuation of a very positive trajectory.”

Renaissance or trajectory, for the man presiding over the rarified air, the quest is simple.

“To be one of the best colleges in the galaxy,” Wilmouth said. “I don’t know why you’d shoot for anything less.”