Nick Swayne is the president of North Idaho College. He’s been president of the Coeur d’Alene community college since March 2023 — or, depending on your perspective, since August 2022. That discrepancy is because Swayne was placed on administrative leave for undisclosed reasons by the college’s trustee board in December 2022 and replaced with an interim president. Then, he sued the board to get his job back. “I came here to be the president, not sit in my house and collect a paycheck,” he said in an interview. Many in the North Idaho College community say the issues that have brought the institution to this point are, at their core, ideological. The situation has drawn comparisons to that at the New School of Florida, where staunch conservatives have sought to remake the institution by pushing back against “woke” doctrine.
