MAGA Board Members Ousted Their President. Here's How He Stuck It Out.

When Nick Swayne took over as president of North Idaho College — assuming a role that had been held by the wrestling coach — the institution’s board of trustees ousted him within months. He sued and was reinstated. Then the board tried to throw out his contract.

Now, years later, Swayne is still in the job.

Those maneuvers were just one episode in a head-spinning saga that nearly cost the community college its accreditation. In that time, North Idaho College weathered four presidents in two years, four lawsuits, a board that at times seemed hostile to the college depending on who was on it, 13 votes of no confidence from faculty, staff, and students by Swayne’s count, and a sanction from the college’s accreditor, the Northwest Commission on Colleges and Universities, that could have been a death sentence.

The story reached a tenuous conclusion this month when the college announced it was back in good standing with the Northwest Commission.

North Idaho College was one of the first higher-education institutions to face major disruption as a result of a perception on the right that it had been captured by leftist ideology that needed to be rooted out — a phenomenon that has come to define higher education in this decade.

At the small, sleepy community college, the accusations felt misplaced to Swayne and many local residents. “We don’t do indoctrination,” Swayne said. “We teach welding and math. It’s two years. You don’t get into deep political theory.”

The college’s governance troubles began in early 2021 when animosity between a board member, Todd Banducci, and a previous president, Rick MacLennan, exploded in public. The president reported to the rest of his board that Banducci had been “aggressive and intimidating” toward him and his wife. Banducci did not respond to a request for an interview but told The Chronicle at the time that his goal was to increase oversight and transparency at the college.

And thus began a battle for the soul of the college in which control of the five-person board swung between Banducci’s allies and more moderate members and then back again. When the reform-minded group held the majority, they took dramatic measures like firing MacLennan and replacing him with the wrestling coach, Michael Sebaaly.

Many of their issues with the college seemed to correspond with broader right-wing critiques of higher education: Banducci disapproved of the college’s mask mandate during the pandemic and a graduation ceremony in which a student left out the words “under God” during the Pledge of Allegiance. He wrote to another student that he was “battling the NIC ‘deep state’ on an almost daily basis,” according to emails. “The liberal progressives are quite deeply entrenched,” he wrote. That faction also pointed to years of declining enrollment as a sign that the college needed a shakeup.

Meanwhile, the college’s accreditor received complaints and began examining whether North Idaho was violating standards on effective governance and institutional integrity. A panel found that the college’s board was “dysfunctional” and that Banducci’s questioning of the curriculum had left faculty members afraid to teach certain topics, among other things.

In 2023, the accreditor sanctioned the college with what amounted to a final warning: Shape up or lose access to federal financial aid. Banducci, for his part, has said he felt the threats to North Idaho’s accreditation were “orchestrated” in part to “neutralize” him and other pro-reform trustees.

One of the more remarkable parts of the story is that Swayne stuck it out as president despite the board’s repeated efforts to fire him. He weathered a prolonged parade of accreditation visits and reviews, internal debates over how the college should prove its viability, and fierce local-election campaigns.

Swayne himself is moderate, he said. He took pride in the fact that as a teacher at James Madison University, his students could never tell where he fell on the political spectrum. Swayne began his career as an army officer, where he said he learned that “you don’t quit in the middle of a fight.” His hometown of Moscow, Idaho, is less than 100 miles from Coeur D’Alene, where North Idaho College is located.

“These are my people,” he said. “I can’t abandon them.”

The other reason he stayed, he said, was that he had the support of the community in Coeur D’Alene. The effort to keep him and put the college back on track was led in part by Christa Hazel, an alum with a law degree, who co-founded a 501(c)(4) organization and a PAC, called Save NIC.

“It is not a symbol of woke elitism,” Hazel said of the college, noting that it has an armory program. “It is an economic engine for the panhandle.”

The PAC, Hazel said, was supported by local business owners. Their goal was to convince the rest of the community that North Idaho College needed to heed the accreditor’s instructions and return to a stable position. They put out explainers on what accreditation is and why it matters, and supported their own candidates for the board.

Hazel, a lifelong Republican, said the conflict over the college didn’t split across traditional partisan lines.

“This really was about a culture war versus good governance,” she said. “Do you use a college to have a showdown with federal regulators and jeopardize financial aid? Or do you work through the issues you may have?”

What happened there could happen anywhere, Hazel said. A political faction from either the right or left can fairly quickly remake a college’s leadership in its own political image. It already is happening at the University of West Florida, Hazel said, where a board, largely hand-picked by Gov. Ron DeSantis, a Republican, recently appointed a former Republican lawmaker as president. Hazel said she was in touch with people who set up another group: Save UWF.

MacLennan, the president who was fired by the board in 2021, said community involvement is crucial for colleges, especially community colleges, who want to retain their independence from political forces. Small, local elections for board seats may not attract much attention, but they can have huge consequences for an institution.

“The dismay in the local community was really profound,” MacLennan said. “It took four years for that community to wrestle themselves back on track.”

Since November 2024, when the current North Idaho College board was instated, Swayne said the college has been on a path toward retaining accreditation. They fixed policies, hired a new general counsel, and renewed Swayne’s contract, among other things.

“He stuck with it,” said MacLennan of Swayne. “The college and community stuck with him.”