Now longest-serving DMACC president, Rob Denson keeps on trucking

Rob Denson worked his way through Iowa State University by driving a semi.

He drove for a Kent Nutrition Group feed mill in his boyhood home of Homestead, and has loved piloting big trucks ever since.

But when it came to the long haul, Denson, now 76, chose a very different profession: being a college president. As of this month, he's been at the wheel of Des Moines Area Community College for a record of more than 20 years.

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There have been a total of four presidents, including Denson, at DMACC over its 57-year history. The tenure record previously was held by Joseph Borgen, the second president of the college, who served from Sept. 1, 1981, to Oct. 1, 2001.

Denson has now guided DMACC for a little over a week longer, and he has no plan to pull over and take a break anytime soon.

He looks back at what he said has been “a lot of modernization” during this time at DMACC's helm.

“We've done a tremendous amount of building," he said.

Denson said since the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been an increase in demand for workers in Iowa, and a parallel growth in enrollment as students prepare to fill those roles.

“We're 13% larger than we were last fall. We are now 5% larger than we were in 2019 before the pandemic, so essentially we're back to pre-pandemic size,” Denson said. “Because of the pandemic, our leadership team started meeting in different ways … so we're much more efficient than we were before.”

He said another big change has been in the freshman classes at the various DMACC campuses ― Des Moines/Urban, Ankeny, Boone, Carroll, Newton, West Des Moines, Ames, Capitol, Evelyn K. Davis, Perry, Southridge and Templeton.

“They've become more diverse ― Iowa has become more diverse, which makes it very exciting,” Denson said. “We travel all over the world to interact with other cultures. We've now got so many of those cultures coming here, and you go into towns like Perry, I mean, it is very exciting just to watch the energy that's there.”

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Since its opening, Denson said, DMACC has become a first-option to many students out of high school on their academic journey. He said though some may think of community colleges as a step down compared to four-year universities, a DMACC education is seen as equivalent by many community members.

“Our quality is as good as anywhere (and) our cost is a third or less of what you pay at a university,” Denson said. “How many people would go out and spend two or three times as much for the same product?”

Plans for retirement?

Denson said although he has “no immediate plans” to retire, when he does, he wants to go back to his first love: truck driving.

“I worked my way through college driving a semi," he said, adding that for years, the Freightliner truck manufacturing company has given him the use for part of each year of a brand new semi in "DMACC blue.”

It's a relationship he cultivated when president of Northeast Iowa Community College after calling on the Truck Country dealership in Dubuque and telling an official there "that I'd driven a semi, and he said, 'Well, take one.' That started it."

He used the trucks to represent the college, driving in parades, and now does the same for DMACC, which recently broke ground for a $9 million expansion of its Transportation Institute in Des Moines, which trains students for the trucking industry.

"I'm the only one that drives" the trucks, he said, adding that he has driven them in "well over 400 parades since I came back [to Iowa] in '98" from a stint working for a Florida college. "We, my wife and I, go, and it's just a good time to meet people and communities. We love it."

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Denson said he has been able to give Gov. Kim Reynolds a ride to the Kent Nutrition mill in Altoona and haul a load of feed with her to Waterloo, as well as give Kent President Gage Kent a ride.

If and when he steps down from leading DMACC, "I'm not going to work full time, but I would probably go over the road periodically just to continue to feed my love of driving semis,” said Denson.

This article originally appeared on Des Moines Register: Rob Denson becomes longest-serving DMACC president