Kent Trachte never imagined he’d lead a college someday.
“When I was a young faculty member, I thought I was going to be a faculty member for my entire life,” Trachte said.
In June, he will retire as one of Lycoming College’s longest-serving presidents. College trustee and former board of trustees chairman Stan Sloter ranks Trachte as one of Lycoming’s best leaders.
“He was absolutely the president we needed at the time … His skills in working with the faculty, his ability to gain trust with the city of Williamsport. There were just elements of his personality that he was able to cultivate in those early years as president that then became just critical, literally, to the survival of the college during COVID,” Sloter said.
Since taking over in 2013, Trachte, who freely shares credit with the board of trustees, initiated new enrollment and employment programs, raised money for new buildings and furthered the arts program’s connection with downtown Williamsport.
Lycoming College ranks seventh in social mobility, 22nd in best-valued schools and 100th in liberal arts schools nationally, according to US News and World Report.
A native of De Pere, Wisconsin, Trachte, 73, grew up watching his father, James Trachte, superintendent of a small school district in De Pere.
“As I became older, I really admired my father for the way he contributed to the community, as well as how he ran a school system,” Trachte said. “To have had the opportunity at this stage of my life to have followed in my father's footsteps and have also been a community leader, that's been a really important part of the experience here.”
In his mind, he thought he would teach political science or serve as a freshman dean until retirement. He taught political science at Gettysburg College, Long Island University and Clark University before moving to administration at Franklin and Marshall College.
At Franklin and Marshall, he became freshman dean, but in 2002 school president John Fry changed his mind about doing that until retirement.
“John pulled me aside - I was in a position similar to a vice president's position - and he said, ‘I've been watching you. I think you should consider the idea of being a college president someday,’” he said. “John then gave me the opportunity to have a wide range of experiences at Franklin and Marshall that really turned out to be great preparation for this.”
At Lycoming, he became the school’s fourth longest-serving president.
One of his first new programs targeted first-generation college students of color and students from lower income families. He said Fry helped him understand Lycoming’s need for a program like that.
Within his first three months, Trachte connected the college to Knowledge is Powerful Program, or KIPP, a network of charter schools across the country.
“These are in cities where the public school system has been largely failing the students. This KIPP entity, which started in Houston, Texas, takes advantage of the opportunity to create charter schools and hires teachers and creates a culture for children coming from those urban areas,” Trachte said.
Now, Sloter, a 1980 Lycoming graduate and first in his family to go to college, said 30% to 40% of Lycoming’s enrollment comes from first-generation students.
“The reality is that that group of first generation kids looks different than it did in my day but they're the same kids,” Sloter said. “I think Kent's one of his real visions was seeing that we needed to change what the student body looked like to keep serving that first generation niche.”
Before the program partnerships, students of color amounted to about 12%. Trachte said the school has had about 35% for eight years.
“In the first year, we recruited more students from Philadelphia, where there is a KIPP school in Philadelphia as well. But then as we built our relationship with the leadership and the college counselors and throughout the KIPP system,” he said.
Under Trachte, the school also added geographical diversity. For example, students from Texas represent the fifth largest of any state.
“If you look at where the college age population is most rapidly, or where it is growing, as opposed to declining in size - Texas and Florida are two of the states. The idea of getting into the Texas market, where there's a particularly fast growing Hispanic, Latino, Latinx population also made sense to us,” he said.
Lycoming significantly lacked in students from abroad, too, but now has about 13 of more than 1,000 students.
“Even before the pandemic, almost nobody sent their students to study abroad. We've now really only been rebuilding that for a couple of years. We had grown and we'd probably doubled,” Trachte said.
The school offered May term travel courses before the pandemic. Students studied abroad for four to five weeks in countries such as Mexico, England and France.
“We were successful in expanding that and really growing the number of students until the pandemic hit,” Trachte said.
Many of these students are from urban areas or first-generation.
“The idea of studying abroad is something that is not common in their family or is common to their thinking,” Trachte said.
He boosted student recruitment from other countries like Mauritius, an island nation east of Madagascar, and Nepal.
“It's an island country (Mauritius) of about a million people, and it was truly serendipitous. There was one student who had Googled, and Lycoming was one of the places that came up. He applied and we accepted him,” Trachte said. “He came here, he loved it and he started posting on his social media.”
Trachte and the school started working together with recruiting organizations. This year, more than five Nepali students attend Lycoming.
The school held classes in-person earlier than most schools during the COVID-19 pandemic in the fall of 2020 and through 2021, chemistry professor Chriss McDonald said. Students and faculty masked up and met face-to-face.
“There were a multitude of meetings trying to figure out how we can continue moving forward with the education of students in a face to face manner. A lot of schools went online at that point, which has subsequently been shown to be an inferior mode of education,” McDonald said.
For his leadership during the pandemic, faculty members honored Trachte in the spring of 2021, McDonald said.
“We surprised him by giving him a physical award, a medal that I'm sure he treasures and keeps in his house,” he said. “I could tell he was surprised and quite pleased to receive it.”
Lycoming College had internship opportunities scattered throughout its business, accounting, psychology and sociology departments. After Trachte became president, he revised the experiential learning program in 2014.
He added more categories, including internships, study-abroad programs and hands-on research opportunities.
“Something that's hands-on, where you're taking the knowledge that you have learned in your courses and you're applying it in another kind of setting,” Trachte said.
As the program developed, the school opened a center for enhanced academic experience.
"A 21st century liberal arts education combines both the traditional classroom and learning of the liberal arts with an expanded set of opportunities for applied learning, so that you can see how your broad liberal arts education, as well as your major can lead to careers and workplace opportunities,” Trachte said.
The school also expanded career advice programs and added internships and externships so that almost every academic department has them, Trachte said.
“I think we're at a point now where all but three of the departments have explicitly developed internship opportunities,” he said.
Trachte helped start Williamsport Internship Summer Experience, which has about 75 students interning each summer.
WISE opens up opportunities with research labs, including at University of North Texas and Cornell University. Some students also interned for the federal government in Washington D.C., Trachte said.
During Trachte’s presidency, the college spent between $65 and $70 million on new buildings, using about $40 million built up by his predecessor, James Douthat.
The new buildings constructed include the Lynn Science Center, the Krapf Gateway Center, The Keiper Stadium at Brandon Park and the Trachte Music Center, named after the president himself despite his not donating to its construction. Trachte isn’t used to its name.
“Although the Trachte Music Center bears my name, I didn't make the gift. There were three trustees, another board chair and another emeritus board member who made significant gifts, and said, ‘We want to name this in recognition of Trachte and the work that he's done at the institution,’” he said.
Each of the other buildings is named after former trustees who donated significantly in the past. Trachte also teamed the school with the Williamsport city government for street improvements.
Trachte and Lycoming College have worked “effectively” with the city and county commissioners, he said. Improvements to Mason Street and Basin Street on campus were made with grants secured by the city.
“Mason Street and Basin Street is now that boulevard that was pretty much an alley before going only one direction. We had to widen the street as the corner was this jagged combination and we had to move some things around and smooth that corner out,” Trachte said.
Trachte brought community engagement through the arts. The art department wanted its own gallery. Before Trachte helped open the Lycoming College Arts Gallery, the gallery was in the school’s Snowden Library.
“What was being used as an art gallery was a space in the library where the lighting was really not adequate for an art gallery. The ceilings were very high, and nobody knew it was there,” Trachte said.
The school found the gallery’s current location, 25 W. 4th St, and leased it in 2014.
“Students now actually have studios on the upper floor above the art galleries,” Trachte said. “It was first of all an important signal that Lycoming was interested in strengthening its connections and its presence in the community. Our senior students get to exhibit their work down there, and when we have an opening, people from the community come in for that.”
Trachte’s accomplishments resonated with faculty and trustees.
Education professor Rachel Hickoff-Cresko said Trachte created a positive environment on campus with strong direction.
“He's such a wonderful human being. I think whenever I think of a leader, I think of somebody who can do a collective effort,” she said.
A firm called Academic Search and a panel of trustees, faculty members and a student led by Susquehanna University’s former president, Jay Lemons, is looking nationally for Trachte’s successor. They anticipate announcing a new president by March.
“Eventually, two to four candidates will be brought to campus for two days, each one separately, and meet with everybody.”
McDonald helped get Trachte his job 11 years ago by serving on that presidential search committee. They’ve been friends since.
“He can tell a joke, he can take criticism. You can have conversations with him where you're talking as equals and he's not talking down to you. He's genuinely interested in what you have to say, and he'll take advice,” he said. “These are important traits for a leader, somebody who's willing to take advice, doesn't think they know it all, willing to pass tasks on to others and allow them to complete them without micromanagement. Yeah, he's great and we chose so well.”
After retirement, Trachte and his wife, Sharon Trachte, plan to move closer to family in Newburgh, New York.
“We made the decision that after 40 years of living wherever the jobs took us, that we were going to retire, we were going to live near our family,” he said. “My wife and I will probably look for opportunities to get on nonprofit boards in the Newburgh, New York area. That's another way that we can give back for all the good fortune that we've had in our lives, but then we're just going to spend some time chilling.”
Whe he leaves in June, he’ll miss his students, with whom he has worked closely the past 11 years, he said.
“When you're at a small college, you actually get to meet students. Not all of them but there will always be in any given graduating class, a couple dozen or more that I've gotten to know well, and then others I've just been able to observe,” Trachte said. “I'm incredibly grateful that people were willing to welcome me and give me that opportunity. I'm an outsider, I didn't grow up here but they brought me in."
