About a year ago, Houston Davis, the president of the University of Central Arkansas in Conway, came to our studio. It was the day before he sat on a panel discussing the future of higher education alongside University of Arkansas Chancellor Charles Robinson and Dennis Riddle, president of Northwest Arkansas Community College. A big part of the conversation that day centered on preparing students for the future.
President Houston Davis is back in northwest Arkansas this week, and he came back to the Carver Center for Public Radio for another conversation. He's still thinking about how higher education can prepare students and the state for what's ahead. And he says UCA's soon-to-open innovation campus is an example of that work.
Davis: We'll have opportunities for applied learning. We'll have, certainly across all of our engineering and STEM programs, opportunities for students and faculty to do their thing. But on the opposite side of the facility, we'll have businesses that are co-located there. They're interested in being there because they want to have access to our faculty and students. So it's an internship center, almost an opportunity for co-op experience.
Kellams: It sounds like at least part of the emphasis here is on collaboration.
Davis: It is, it is. Good partnerships, good collaboration between business and higher education need to lead to good applied learning, applied research, thinking about how is it not only that students are learning theoretically, but they're learning how to apply that knowledge. I love that in the robotics labs and things like that that are going to be within that facility. It'll be an opportunity to really explore, put hands on things. How does it work? How can you stretch the boundaries of your knowledge around how that thing works? There's bound to be good things to happen. And we're not surprised at all that businesses have really responded positively about co-locating some of their operations on the opposite side of that building.
Kellams: Where will the building be? Is it on campus proper?
Davis: No, it's about three miles just to the southeast of the UCA campus, the way the crow flies. It's the former — a lot of people in the Conway area in central Arkansas know it as the former HP facility. Hewlett Packard had their operation there. Most recently, Gainwell Technologies operated some of their health IT division out of that space.
Kellams: I see that on I-40. Don't I go past that?
Davis: Yes, yes. Right there. Just as you get a little closer into Little Rock going southeast from Conway. That facility — it's about a 180,000-square-foot facility we're going to be in, and they call it "the bigger half," which is a new term. It's roughly 93,000-94,000 square feet of that facility where we and the University of Arkansas Community College at Morrilton will co-locate our open concept classrooms and labs. And then the opposite side, 87,000-88,000 square feet, will be where businesses will be co-located. So excited. And it will have an incubation sort of focus. But what I'm really excited about is we're going to have established businesses there. This isn't just people thinking prospectively about what they're trying to create. It'll be established businesses that will be looking to include us in their work, and hopefully we're giving students opportunities, especially through internships, to really be able to have an immediate transition into employment opportunities with those businesses.
Kellams: The business partners who will be on the other side of that building — what were the conversations like to encourage them to be part of this?
Davis: We're working in partnership with the Conway Development Corporation on this, and they're still in the process of making announcements about firms and groups that will be in there. One entity that has already signed on is an IT firm. They'll have 40 to 50 employees that will be there. We're talking about established companies that are excited about the idea. They heard that we were going to make the commitment to launch the innovation campus. They love the idea that they're going to have access to our computer science, our data sciences, our robotics faculty and students. It's an easy fit for them to know that there's a synergy that will exist. There's a pharmaceutical manufacturing group that has some interest in the facility. There's another group that's focused on energy sciences. They're very excited about being able to access the faculty in the biology and chemistry space that might be co-located out there. So to me, place matters. Being in a place matters. Proximity matters. I think it's been a pretty easy sell for the Conway Development Corporation to talk to these firms about, hey, here's what's going to be there. You want to be in that space to be able to benefit from the energy that's going to occur with the students and the faculty in that space.
Kellams: It sounds like in 2026, you are advocating that a university campus cannot be an island.
Davis: It absolutely, positively cannot be. We're proud of that. UCA does some things very, very well. We're also good about choosing — if we're going to choose to allocate resources, how are we going to do that and do that not only well, but make certain that we're really making a difference? I think a lot of our conversation about making certain that we have future-ready foundations for our programs is looking at where are there opportunities for expansion. Obviously in the health sciences and in the science and engineering, in business and MIS and insurance risk management, some of the things that we're doing in thinking about different educational technology opportunities in the College of Education — those are things that we can do very well. So what is it that the state of Arkansas, not only the region that just surrounds us there in Conway, but throughout the state — what are assets that can make a difference in communities? Our Community Development Institute lots of times answers that bell of going into local areas, understanding what is the grand challenge that that community is wanting to take on, and then being able to shuttle the resources, whether they come from UCA or from some other university, to be able to meet the needs of that community.
Kellams: Of course, there's the word in the name of the university — central. Central Arkansas. So for years, decades, people in other parts of the state might not have thought of UCA as something beyond central Arkansas, but that's changing.
Davis: Oh, it absolutely is. I think I usually get people to say, really, when I say we get students from all 75 counties and we send alumni every year to 75 counties. We really do have a statewide reach. And then beyond that, we get students from 46 states. That's what's currently at the university. We have over 40 countries represented. Our campus extends the reach. But principally, I think about our undergraduate population. We have 10,000 students, 8,000 undergrads. 90% of those undergraduate students come from Arkansas counties. So we do have a statewide mission. We have a statewide reach. We have a statewide impact. And I think last year when we were here doing some things in northwest Arkansas, part of our tagline is UCA is central to northwest Arkansas, because we want to make certain that we're seen as a part of that. But I would say that equally UCA is central to the Delta, UCA is central to southwest Arkansas and meeting the needs of those communities. And most of the time that's going to be done through partnerships with other higher education institutions. What we're committed to is the concept that you can be a force multiplier when you're willing to lay your resources against others. And I'm very, very lucky that we've got great relationships with a lot of presidents and chancellors from a number of different types of institutions. And if we're sitting there talking about, well, what is it that Malvern needs, where are the challenges that that particular community is trying to meet, we know that we can call upon other higher education partners to probably come ready with force-ready solutions to that.
Houston Davis is president of the University of Central Arkansas. Our conversation was recorded in the Anthony and Susan Hui News Studio.
Ozarks at Large transcripts are created on a rush deadline and edited for length and clarity. Copy editors utilize AI tools to review work. KUAF does not publish content created by AI. Please reach out to kuafinfo@uark.edu to report an issue. The audio version is the authoritative record of KUAF programming.
