COEUR D’ALENE — Lloyd Duman has tried to retire twice.

The former North Idaho College provost hopes the third time is the charm.

Duman kept returning to NIC after retiring because he saw the opportunity to stabilize the college as it nearly lost accreditation and faced fears of closure. Stopping that “became my mission,” Duman said.

NIC returned to full accreditation this spring. Duman, true to his word, retired in June.

Duman and his replacement, Gwen Cash-James, have a key thing in common: They both took nontraditional paths through college, much like the students NIC serves.

NIC President Nick Swayne said the college doesn’t seek leaders who followed an alternative pathway. People who had to find their own way often find NIC.

“Those people tend to congregate toward community colleges,” he said. “And they turn out to be a good fit.”

Duman and Cash-James say their personal experiences uniquely qualified them for the provost role at different moments. For Duman, it was saving the college. For Cash-James, it’s uniting academics and student services to best serve the whole student and community now that the school has returned to good standing.

From manual laborer to literary leader

Duman, 69, hails from southern Oregon, where he married young and worked at a mill after high school. He also held jobs as a garbage man and a fence builder.

At 35 and with two kids, Duman wanted to coach high school baseball, and it would be easier to get a job with a teaching degree. But after a year and a half teaching English, he realized high school wasn’t a good fit.

He enrolled at the University of Montana to earn a master’s degree in linguistics and literature. In 1993, he had just graduated and was road tripping home to Oregon with his wife, Jaime, when the couple decided to pull off in Coeur d’Alene.

“We had never ever stopped,” Duman said of CDA. “We thought, they have a college here.”

The couple spotted a listing for a literature job at NIC. Duman applied. By August 1993, the family had relocated to Coeur d’Alene.

“I started work the day we moved,” Duman said.

He slowly moved up the academic ranks. He was passed over to be dean and enrolled in a Ph.D. program at Antioch University in 2013. The program was unique, with the cohort taking classes at Antioch campuses across the country.

“It was fantastic,” Duman said.

His thesis was on a resilience thinking model, an expertise he later drew on during the NIC crisis.

Duman finished the degree in 2017 and remained a dean at NIC as he looked toward retirement in 2021.

Then the troubles started. NIC’s President Rick MacLennan was fired without cause, the first in a series of moves by the board of trustees that ultimately led the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities to place the college on show cause status, the step before losing accreditation.

So Duman stayed on longer.

Swayne was hired as president in June of 2022. Duman planned to retire that September but was asked to stay on as interim provost.

Swayne recalls a walk the pair took by the lake in those early days.

“We just clicked,” Swayne said.

During a time of turmoil, the trust Duman had with his colleagues was invaluable, Swayne said.

“Everybody on campus and in the community trusted him,” Swayne said. “He was part of the glue that kept things together.  Without a guy like Lloyd, it would have been much harder.”

Then trustees fired Swayne, so Duman was appointed co-interim president.

The situation was “stressful,” but Duman decided he wasn’t going to let the college lose accreditation.

A new interim president, Greg South, pushed Duman out. Duman had let his retirement papers go through when Swayne won his court case to be reinstated as the school’s leader.

Duman was driving to Western Washington to see his grandkids when he got the call. Swayne asked Duman to stay on as interim provost. Duman promptly turned around and went back to work.

“There’s a joke in there that I can’t retire,” Duman said.

“For the first two years, it was survival,” he said.

Duman helped compile mountains of paperwork for accreditors, coordinated campus visits, and frequently met with faculty to ensure that administrators were doing what they could.

But the tide turned when voters elected new trustees. Duman committed to seeing the college through to full accreditation. Once done, he knew “it’s time.”

“I completed my mission, and that was my goal,” Duman said.

Duman wanted to protect the institution that set his life on a new trajectory.

“NIC opens doors for them that may not be opened otherwise,” Duman said. “That’s kind of what education did for me.”

A focus on family leads Cash-James to innovation

Cash-James, 58, experimented with college a few times throughout the late 80s and early 90s, but nothing stuck.

She took classes at Whitworth University in North Spokane and enrolled off and on at area community colleges. Then an English class from professor Scott Orme at Spokane Community College inspired her to become a professor.

“That just became the path forward,” Cash-James said.

In 1993, she had just given birth to her first daughter when she enrolled at Eastern Washington University with her husband. She finished her bachelor’s degree shortly after giving birth to her son in 1994 and enrolled in a master’s program that fall.

She graduated while pregnant with her third child and gave birth midway through her first semester teaching at Spokane Community College. She brought her newborn to class with her.

“I loved the students,” Cash-James said. “My favorite things to teach were poetry and creative writing.”

Cash-James isn’t sure all of her community college students became better writers from her classes. But many discovered something about themselves, she said: an intellectual curiosity and a drive to figure out who they are and who they want to be.

Cash-James began teaching at Columbia Basin Community College in Pasco, Washington in 2000. She grew disenchanted with the grading load as she took on leadership roles, where she pushed for a more modern teaching style.

She chaired faculty senate and was a union leader before becoming an administrator.

In 2012, Cash-James returned to Spokane Community College, where she became a dean.

She earned a second master’s degree in creative writing and a doctorate in higher education administration. Cash-James left SCC in 2023 for Eastern Washington University, where she worked until she took the job at NIC this spring.

Cash-James, who is now raising her two grandchildren, had hoped to take on the provost role but didn’t think an opportunity in the Inland Northwest would come up.

The NIC job is unique: Before Duman, just one person had served as provost. Cash-James will be the first to have the role outside of “crisis mode,” she said.

“The depth and breadth of her experience” make her the right fit for the college, Swayne said.

Her goal is to unite the college’s academic and student services wings to better serve the whole student. So far, faculty members have been extremely welcoming, she said. Cash-James describes her approach as family-first, extending that same whole-person philosophy to employees.

She’s excited about the NIC guarantee program, which launched this fall and promises a job or additional training and support within six months of graduation.

“It’s the real deal and we mean that,” she said.

She knows it can be tough to have a new leader come in and make changes, but Cash-James said she’s surprised at how open the staff has been to new ideas.