Homewood resident Pamela J. Haney makes multi-tasking look easy. 

As president of Moraine Valley Community College in Palos Hills, she’s the chief executive with responsibilities that include making sure the campus is a welcoming and inclusive place for faculty, students, and the community, providing a vision for the college’s operations and programs, nurturing excellence, and providing the vision to move Moraine Valley forward.

When she leaves her bright, spacious office in the college’s D-Building for the day, she steps into a role just as demanding and important – wife of Homewood Village Manager Napoleon Haney; mom to the couple’s two sons, 22-year-old Justin and 19-year-old Jacob; and a good neighbor and friend to everyone in her orbit. Justin graduated from Moraine and works as a fitness trainer. Jacob just completed his first year at Illinois State University.

 “My husband is just as busy as I am,” she said, “So sometimes Napoleon brings dinner home and sometimes I come home and cook because I just like to do it,” she said. “That’s the me that’s like the mom part, the wife part and I feel happy doing it.  Also, we all try to go to each other’s events when we can. But on the weekends, we just hang out at home or in downtown Homewood.

 “In Homewood, I’m close to everything and we live walking distance to downtown, which is nice, especially in the summer. I also enjoy the local festivals and holiday events. And now downtown is becoming much more of a vibrant place with new restaurants, arts festivals, and on Saturday mornings, the farmer’s market. But my favorite thing to do in Homewood is to walk to Dairy Queen and get ice cream. We love Dairy Queen in the evenings and it’s near us. Homewood is so family oriented. I just love the place.”

When Haney talks about her job as president of a community college that strives to deliver cutting-edge curriculum to 17,000 students from 26 communities, she seems almost incredulous. “It is exciting, but it also is a huge responsibility. I’m honored and privileged to have the role.” 

Haney said she didn’t start out on her career path aiming for the top rung in a college administration, but when she looks back, she sees that “everything that’s happened in the past has been like building blocks to get me where I am today.” 

Those “building blocks” included being program administrator of Communications Arts at Defiance College in Ohio, a part-time instructor on a military base in Norfolk, Virginia, while simultaneously working as an assistant professor of Speech Communications at Norfolk State University and serving as the university ombudsman for faculty and staff at the University of Nevada-Reno.  

She took a position as an assistant dean at Moraine Valley in 2001, the first of six posts she has held there. Her success in securing major grants, implementing initiatives to prepare students for emerging career paths, and her commitment to making education accessible for all contributed to her being named vice president of Academic Affairs in 2012. 

When the opportunity to move up to president arrived in 2023, she was ready. 

“I loved my role as vice president and every position I had before this has been beneficial in helping me with this role,” she said. Working various jobs at Moraine Valley gave her the opportunity to establish relationships and really get to know the academic landscape, making her uniquely qualified to be president.

 “I have a very good team,” she said. “You want to do well, but I try to look at it more as ‘I’m here to do a job.’ The other thing is that I’ve worked with most of the people here for a very long time. Most of the people here stay. It’s a fabulous place to work!”

Asked if she is focused on a marquee initiative at this time, Haney said she would like to “. . . make sure we continue to be a welcoming and inclusive environment. The other thing that I would like to do is to make sure that we see our students from enrollment to completion and make sure that we are offering them the necessary soft skills and knowledge they need to be successful.

“When we meet with our industry partners, they tell us that students’ technical skills are fine, but to please make sure we incorporate some of these soft skills because they need to know how to communicate with others. We cover a lot of that in our college 101 class that teaches basic skills like time management, financial literacy, interpersonal communication skills, and just engaging with others in the classroom—things that you can do to be more successful.”