WINONA, Minn. — The Winona State executive who strategized the university’s financial trial through three presidents, Scott Ellinghuysen, is retiring. He has announced his departure after 36 years, including 25 as vice president for finance. The current university president, Ken Janz, said there will be a national search for successor. The position pays $204,000. Ellinghuysen also has served on the boards of the WSU Foundation, the Minnesota State Chief Financial Officer Advisory Group, the state Higher Learning Commission’s Institutional Actions Council, and the National Colleges Committee on Sustainability. He has received the Minnesota State Chancellor’s Award three times. During his tenure Winona State earned 14 consecutive awards from the Minnesota State college system financial management.

Ellinghuysen profile

Ellinghuysen, a Winona State grad, joined the financial staff in 1989. Coincidentally it was the same year that Darrell Krueger became university president. It was Krueger who later put Ellinghuysen in charge of finances and facilities. Ellinghuysen’s early years as a vice president were easy, at least relatively. Enrollment was growing. There was institutional stability.

Troubled times

After Judith Ramaley became president, enrollment began to slip — a reflection of social and cultural changes shifts beyond local control. There also came Ramaley’s erratic top-level personnel shake-ups and policy shifts to force a remolding of the university to her vision. Ellinghuysen survived the Ramaley shake-ups, which purged several men from leadership. Ramaley recognized Ellinghuysen as invaluable for his deep grasp of the intricacies of the university’s infrastructure and dynamics that no outsider could catch up on.

Stability amid enrollment crises

The university culture returned to an even keel with Scott Olson’s arrival as president. But alas, the enrollment decline deepened. Ellinghuysen arranged campus-wide forums over several years to brain-storm ways to address crippling revenue losses. It was a strategy that gave everyone — faculty, staff and students — a community feel as being part of evolving solutions. Through 13 years of enrolment drops from a 6,900 peak, with revenue hemorrhaging, there were no dismissal of any faculty and only minor program construction.

Milestones

Ellinghuysen navigated novel financing to build the East Sarnia dorms through the WSU Foundation as a borrowing agent. There environmentally friendly upgrades that drew national attention. A continuing challenge in Ellinghuysen’s later years was unravelling an ambitious but failed Kruger project — the so-called “residential college” at Lourdes Hall 1-1/2 miles from the main campus at the old College of St. Teresa. Although the residential college concept collapsed, Lourdes Hall remained a financial albatross. Ellinghuysen finally unloaded the building, albeit at major financial loss but there was good news: No longer was it a fiscal drain. Other good news for Ellinghuysen’s successor: Enrollment, although only 5,600, appears to have bottomed out and is on the climb.