RUSSELLVILLE, Ark. (April 28, 2008)--Dr. Cora McHenry, a former member of the Arkansas Tech University Board of Trustees and the current president of Shorter College in North Little Rock, challenged an overflow crowd of Arkansas Tech students to think and live beyond their own communities when she spoke as part of the Norman Lecture Series at Ross Pendergraft Library and Technology Center Room 300 on Thursday, April 24.
“We have inherited a great opportunity,” said McHenry, who served on the Tech Board of Trustees from 1977-82. “Our challenge is to give back. We can embrace the global community we live in and recognize that when different cultures come together, it enriches us all.
“We must get the mindset in place that we can no longer pretend that America is isolated from the rest of the world,” continued McHenry. “The notion of a global society is where we need to begin.”
McHenry has served as president at Shorter College since May 2002. From 1985-2000, she was executive director of the Arkansas Education Association, where she was the first African-American female to head a state affiliate of the National Education Association.
McHenry’s Norman Lecture Series speech was entitled “An Evolutionary Walk Through Education.” She told the standing room only crowd about growing up in Augusta, Ark., and why she only attended school 4-to-6 months per year because she had to help her family in the cotton fields of Southeast Arkansas.
She went on to attend Arkansas AM&N College, now the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff, and graduate from Southern University in Baton Rouge, La., with a degree in secondary education and English.
While McHenry was a student at Southern, a pair of African-American students were arrested for what she described as “going to the wrong part of town” in what was still a segregated community.
Members of the Southern student body bailed their fellow students out of jail and began planning protests against the laws that had led to their arrest. Southern University officials told the students that if they participated in the protests, they would be asked to leave school.
For education students like McHenry, the consequences of protest included a permanent restriction upon obtaining a teacher’s license in that state.
“I can’t get a teacher’s license in Louisiana,” McHenry told the audience.
She returned home to Arkansas and taught high school students in Camden from 1960-70, a period of time that she described as “probably the best 10 years of her life” because of the enjoyment she received from teaching and watching her students grow.
“They were so full of energy and surprises,” said McHenry.
McHenry began her career at the Arkansas Education Association in 1970. She took a leave of absence in 1975 to serve as an education aide to then-Gov. Dale Bumpers. McHenry’s influence in the governor’s office helped lead to a new law that required the state of Arkansas to provide free text books to students in kindergarten through 12th grade. Previously, free text books were only guaranteed to students through the sixth grade.
In April 1977, McHenry became the first female and the first minority to serve on the Arkansas Tech Board of Trustees. Her influence on the Tech campus continues today through the Cora McHenry Scholarship for Teaching Excellence, which is a competitive tuition scholarship awarded to minority students who demonstrate a commitment to teaching in Arkansas public schools.
McHenry’s community involvement includes serving as the chairperson for the Daisy Gatson Bates Holiday Committee, a position she was appointed to by Gov. Mike Beebe on Feb. 18, 2008.
