Roger L. Worsley

Roger Lewis Worsley (born March 22, 1937) is a retired college administrator who from 1985 to 1995 was the president of Laredo Community College in Laredo, Texas, and from 1996 to 2005 the chancellor of Southern Arkansas University Tech in Camden, Arkansas.^[1]

Background

Worsley was born in rural Hunter in Cass County in southeastern North Dakota to Craig E. Worsley (1912-1992) and the former Louise M. Skue (1912-1997). He was reared in Midland in the central portion of the Lower Peninsula of Michigan, where he graduated in 1955 from Midland High School.^[2] Craig and Louise Worley are interred at Midland City Cemetery.^[3]

Worsley obtained a Bachelor of Arts from Arizona State University in Tempe, Arizona., which he attended under a full athletic scholarship from 1955 to 1959. He was elected in 1959 to Phi Delta Kappa, professional organization of educators. That same year he was named vice president of the Phi Epsilon Kappa fraternity at ASU.^[4]

On August 7, 1958, while he was still in college, Worsley wed at the First Baptist Church of Mesa, Arizona, the former Glenda Jane Taylor (1937-1979), born in Phoenix and reared in Mesa. His father-in-law was Jack Taylor,^[5] an educator and a Republican politician who was the mayor of Mesa from 1966 to 1972 and thereafter a member, consecutively, of both houses of the Arizona State Legislature. The Worsleys had a son, Roger Jackson Worsley (born c. 1960), of Placerville, California, and a daughter, Joni Jane Worsley Fisher (born 1962), wife of Mark Wydenes Fisher, both of Alamo, California.^[6] Roger and Glenda Worsley divorced in 1973, six years before Glenda's death. She had returned to the use of her maiden name and is interred beside her parents, Jack and Eda Sarah Jane Nevans Taylor (1911-1995) at the City of Mesa Cemetery.

Worsley then married the former Linda Ann Howie (born 1949), from whom he later divorced. The daughter of John and Emma Howie, originally from Grand Junction, Colorado, Linda Howie graduated in 1967 from the Roman Catholic Hoy Cross Abbey boarding school in Cañon City, Colorado.^[7] A real estate broker, she was residing in Tucson, Arizona, at the time of the death of her brother, John C. Howie (1945-2014), a former Kodak employee who later started his own landscaping company.^[8]

Career

Early years

Worsley began teaching and coaching while also pursuing his Master of Science and Doctor of Education degrees at Arizona State University in 1962 and 1969, respectively.^[4] From 1959 to 1963, he taught at Kofa High School in the Yuma Union High School District of Yuma in the desert country of southern Arizona. From 1963 to 1965, he taught at Mesa High School in suburban Mesa. He was from 1967 to 1969 on the faculty of Mesa Community College, a part of the large Maricopa County Community College District. In 1969, he was promoted to dean, a post he filled until 1978, when he was named vice-chancellor for the rapidly growing University of Alaska Anchorage, formerly Anchorage Community College, in Anchorage, Alaska.

Laredo Community College

After nine years in Anchorage, Worsley was selected as only the fourth president at Laredo Community College, which had begun classes with eight hundred students in the fall of 1947 as Laredo Junior College. It was renamed in 1993, as enrollments steadily climbed and new studies were added to the curriculum.^[9] Worsley succeeded Domingo Arechiga, the president from 1974 to 1985, for whom are named a campus building, the former Fort McIntosh enlisted men's barracks,^[10] and a scholarship.^[11]

Worsley's secretary at LCC, the former Cynthia M. Jackson, now Cynthia Mares, was thereafter elected as a trustee for LCC; she remains a member and former president of the board. Worsley was active in Laredo community affairs, including the country club. He retired in 1995 after a decade as the LCC president and after thirty-six years in professional education. Then State Representative Henry Cuellar, since Texas' 28th congressional district member of the United States House of Representatives, introduced a resolution in 1989 to honor Worsley for his work at LCC. At the time, he was in his fourth year as the LCC president.^[12] Worsley and Linda relocated to Hot Springs Village, Arkansas. In 2007, Worsley and his successor as the LCC president, Ramón H. Dovalina, were named presidents emeritus at the sixtieth anniversary celebration for the institution held in September under the newly inaugurated president, Juan L. Maldonado.^[13]

Southern Arkansas University Tech

After a year and a half in his first retirement, Worsley returned to higher education in November 1996, when he accepted the chancellorship of Southern Arkansas University Tech, formerly South Arkansas Technical Institute, located in Highland Industrial Park in East Camden. In this capacity in 2001, Worsley reported that 112 former employees, a fifth of the work force of the closed International Paper plant in Camden, were at Southern Arkansas Tech seeking educational credentials for other jobs, many with state financial assistance. He noted that many of the jobs for which the workers were training were in computer networking and electronics, openings mostly unavailable in Camden and the South Arkansas region.

Worsley introduced internet classes, and enrollment expanded in the various specialty schools at the institution. When he retired from Southern Arkansas Tech in 2005, the Arkansas General Assembly honored Worsley's contributions to higher education. Legislators noted the increase in enrollment from 700 to 2,100 during Worsley's tenure at the institution, which became the fastest-growing college in Arkansas. Southern Arkansas Tech grew 24.6 percent in the fall of 2004 and 26.7 percent in the spring of 2005.^[4]

Awards and scholarly activities

In 1971, Worsley was named "Outstanding Educator of America"; in 1974, he was cited as a "Leader in Education." In 1976, he was included in The Biography of Notable Americans, in 1984, in Who's Who in the West, and in 1992, in Oxford's Who's Who.^[4]

Worsley was affiliated with the American Society of Training and Development, the National Association of Student Personnel Administrators, and Phi Delta Kappa, as the president of his chapter from 1975 to 1976. From 1979 to 1981, he was the president of the Alaska Community Education Association. In 1982 and 1983, he sat on the board of the Alaska Coordinating Council—Higher Education Management Institute.

He is the author of Mesa's Power Attack: Football's Winningest Offense (1967), an examination of the high school football strategy developed by Coach Edgar "Mutt" Ford of Westwood High School in Mesa.^[14]

Retirement in Florida

Worsley's third wife is the former Carolyn Griffith Gilley (born 1947), the second of three children of the late Hiram B. Griffith, Jr., and the former Dorothy "Dottie" Haynes (c. 1919-2009) of Knoxville, Tennessee. Until 2011, Roger and Carolyn Gilley resided in Cumming in Forsyth County in suburban Atlanta, Georgia.^[15]

Worsley and Carolyn relocated in 2011 to The Villages, a census designated place and planned retirement community near Lady Lake in Sumter County in central Florida, where he is a Democratic registered voter, but his wife is a Republican.^[16][17]

References