Northern now moving to build equine center

Despite the school year winding down Montana State University-Northern has a busy few months ahead of it, with planning for their new equine center ongoing, as well as a number of events coming up in the more immediate future, including this week.

Northern Chancellor Greg Kegel said the university has plenty going on and he's excited about what the campus is working on.

Equine center

Kegel said when he became chancellor eight years ago the university was working on a number of initiatives to drive enrollment. The Diesel Technology Center was a big one, and another was the campus' football stadium, both of which he said have been successful.

The third one they talked about was an equine center, and after a gift of land from the Harmon family, long-time supporters of Northern, they have the perfect place to construct a building Kegel hopes will become a multi-use facility for the campus and the community.

The 42-acre plot of land is on the west side of Havre near Schine Electric.

He said he's been involved in the horse industry in one capacity or another for most of his life so this was a project he was particularly interested in, a project that is now entering its design phase.

He said he's been impressed by how the campus' rodeo culture has evolved and grown over the years he's been at Northern and plenty of students have expressed excitement about the facility.

"You wouldn't believe how many students that come in here and said 'I'm very interested in that. I wanna bring my horse up,'" Kegel said.

He said he looked around the U.S. at schools with similar facilities and they seem to be very successful ventures, and based on talks he's had with people with experience operating such facilities Havre is really a perfect place for one.

With the Canadian border just north of town, and drivable distances from a number of communities with a lot of people with horses, it seems like a perfect fit, he said.

Kegel said curriculum for equine and agriculture studies, are being tailored to fit the new facility and will be submitted to the Montana Board of Regents of Higher Education soon.

He said the new facility could support a minor or associate degree in equine studies, but he's also hoping it becomes a multi-purpose facility that can be used by the community as much as the campus.

He said the facilities he looked at across the U.S. were often able to accommodate a tremendous variety of events and he's hoping this equine center will do the same.

"I couldn't believe how many things you can do in a facility like this, including wedding receptions, the weddings themselves, garden shows, ag equipment indoor shows, sales. They used them for livestock sales, horse shows, horse sales, arena activities like roping events, rodeos, cutting events," Kegel said.

He said he was involved in the original plans for the Bigger Better Barn on the Great Northern Fairgrounds, which was originally going to be more multi-use, something he always wished it had been, and this facility may be able to do that.

He said the project hasn't hit any major snags so far, but they will need to look at putting together a capital campaign to fund much of the undertaking.

"A facility like that will probably have to be mostly outside money," he said.

Kegel said the land the Harmon family donated can be put to use for students with horses before the center goes up, as they may level some property to give them a place to ride on.

"That might be the first step," he said.

This week's events

On top of the ongoing planning for the equine center, Northern will also be hosting its annual award banquet for student athletes, where the university seniors will be recognized for their accomplishments.

Kegel said all athletic teams will be recognized at the event, from wrestling to basketball to cross country.

This year has been big for sports, he said, especially with Northern's new track team, which he said the school hasn't had in recent memory.

He also said the school is looking hard at adding women's wrestling, with a formal proposal set to arrive at his office this week.

This Friday evening, Kegel said, the university will also be holding their Spring Fling, a fundraiser by the Northern Lights Athletic Scholarship Foundation.

He said it's easily one of the most fun events of the year, with live and silent auctions and plenty of games.

"Anything they can think of to get you to free up some money," he said chuckling.

Beyond this week, Kegel said, Northern will also be hosting the Board of Regents in the second week of May, and the day before that they will be holding a get-together and dinner for state legislators, where university staff will talk about the value of the university to Montana and host a vendor show.

He said planning is still going on for this year's graduation, which will, after two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, look much more normal this time around.

Last year, he said, graduation was split up into two sections, and the year before it was canceled all together.

Kegel said 2020's canceled graduation, and telling students that went home for spring break not to come back if they didn't have to, was very difficult for him and many others.

"Those were the two hardest things I've ever done as chancellor," he said.

Reflecting on two years of COVID-19

Kegel said he believes Northern did better than most adjusting to the pandemic, and over all did an excellent job dealing with the crisis, taking it very seriously and implementing measures to slow the spread and keep people safe, but there was a price paid for those measures, by everyone.

"It was hard. It was hard on everybody." he said. "... It wasn't anything close to a university. In a university everyone is engaged in all kinds of different activities and discourse, and you take that away and what do you have?"

He said Northern has a substantial online presence and had been doing online education for some time, but scaling all of that up to accommodate all their students was a challenge, especially with so many students who initially didn't have the devices, data plans, or infrastructure to attend a full university online.

But despite the hardship, Kegel said, faculty and students did what they needed to do and adjusted very well.

"There was suffering," he said. "... It was hard on everybody, but we graduated students, we kept students on task, we did what we needed to do online, they completed their objectives. ... We didn't lose enrollment, we graduated the same number of students, it just wasn't the same good experience."

Later in the pandemic, he said, he and the school in general worked hard to encourage everyone to get vaccinated so everyone could come back, but in that respect the school only did about as well as the national average.

Kegel said there were a number of factors at play there, but regardless, the school is more or less back to normal now, and he, as well as most everybody else, is glad to be back at it again.

However, he said, the COVID-19 pandemic is not gone just yet, and the university is still taking the situation seriously, as it remains a potentially deadly disease, a fact he doesn't wish to minimize.

The last two years have been difficult for Northern, he said, but he's excited for the future with a new football coach in Jerome Souers and enrollment for summer programs now beginning.