IN BROWN HALL ON THE CAMPUS of Norfolk State University in Virginia, on a January morning two days after UMass alumna and new NSU president Marie McDemmond '84G announced a financial crisis so stunning it was expected to require, within months, some 100 layoffs among a 1,200-person staff, a row of administrators sat onstage, gazing out over rows of young people gathered for the new-student orientation program.
A striking feature of this scene, to a northern, white observer, was that most of the administrators and most of the students were black. Also striking, and surely related to the fact that the pin-neat campus we were visiting is a southern, historically black school, was a particular blend of courtliness and audience participation.
When the vice president for student affairs another UMass alumnus and recent arrival at NSU, Arthur Jackson '88G stepped to the podium, he called out "Good morning!" and received a chorus of "Good morning!"s in reply. When presiding administrator Antoinette K. Lampkin made the pointed remark that "You start learning today, and one of the things you learn is that at Norfolk State young men do not wear hats indoors," the half-dozen caps spotted throughout the audience were obediently and immediately pulled off.
Marie McDemmond '84G
And there were references to God: possibly more than usual, given the trials that NSU was newly facing, but in any case frequent, unapologetic, and apparently unself-conscious. When the first of several questions sent up by students was read aloud as "How can we help President McDemmond and the NSU family during the current financial crisis?" the answer from McDemmond's assistant Jacqueline Curtis began, "Well, to begin with, we can pray for her."
McDemmond, to her own chagrin, was not among the administrators greeting new students and parents that morning. Though she'd be up and racing around with trademark energy the next day, on this day she was flat on her back in bed in the President's House, under doctor's orders to recover from an attack of sinusitis before returning to her duties.
"She would have been here with you if she'd been allowed," Curtis told the assembled students. "This is not a woman who lets just `Not feeling well' stop her."
McDemmond could not be stopped, indeed, from talking on the phone, at least, with a visitor from UMass. Having had her assistants seat us in her office indeed at her desk she said, "Well, now at least you can see my house." (The NSU's President's House, neocolonial and red-brick like much of the several-square-block, 8,000 student campus, is just yards from the Harrison B. Wilson administration building, named for McDemmond's predecessor, in which her third-floor corner office is located.) And, having made sure we had her direct number and would make an appointment for an extended phone interview the next week, she proceeded, with characteristic charm, to ask about people and conditions at UMass.
FROM INTERSTATE 64 IN NORFOLK, as you swing past NSU on your way downtown from the airport, a spanking new stadium is the most prominent feature of the campus. The home of the NSU football team is in fact one emblem of the crisis besetting the school. Lagging revenues from the stadium, in which the inaugural game was played shortly after McDemmond took office last July, account for nearly a third of the $6.5 million deficit. An even larger chunk of the problem was a drop in enrollment, which had been anticipated but not planned for financially, triggered by a tightening admissions standard that took effect last fall.
Layoffs, and a possible loan from the state to cover salaries of those who remain, were being explored as short-term antidotes. Longer-term cures would be further restructuring (recent months had already seen the departure of five of the six vice-presidents who served under Wilson); larger class sizes ("Twenty to twenty-two students is great for educational purposes," said McDemmond in January, "but when you're a state university, that size has to go up"); higher fees at least for non-Virginians, and redoubled efforts to shake more support out of the Virginia legislature. (The state has been granting NSU less than 40 percent of the per/pupil funding it awards to its financially most-favored four-year institution, the Virginia Military Academy.)
McDemmond is an expert in institutional finance who, during her time at UMass, was associate vice chancellor of administration and finance, as well as the first African-American woman in the central administration. The daughter of two products of the small, historically black university that she herself would attend Xavier in New Orleans McDemmond was orphaned as a child and raised by extended family; she is a phenomenally determined and capable woman who has, in addition, an unusual capacity to excite admiration and loyalty.
"Golden" is an adjective we've heard applied to her by more than one person. "Regal" and "accessible" are two others which, in her case, are apparently not mutually exclusive.
"I wanted to be a president," says McDemmond of her career path, which has followed a trajectory of increasing responsibility since she left UMass in 1984. Her most recent post was a chief operating officer for Florida Atlantic University, which has seven campuses and a student body that more than doubled, to 21,000 students, during her eight years there.
Setting her sights on several institutions of a size and quality that she thought would be particularly amenable to positive change, and valuing as she does the "HBCUs" historically black colleges and universities McDemmond was particularly happy, she says, when Norfolk State was "first to come open." Even before she accepted the job, however, she was reported in the press to have concerns about the budget she was inheriting at NSU.
Now, she says, "It's going to be harder than I'd hoped" to fulfill her goals for the school. Among these are a radical improvement in graduation rates, which have been stuck at a dispiriting 22 percent within seven years of matriculation a key indicator, in McDem-mond's mind, that NSU is falling short in what members of the administration repeatedly stressed, in remarks to parents of new students on that orientation day, as their central commitment: "the success of your sons and daughters." The new president's goal is to get graduation rates up to "at least 40 percent after five years of college by three years from now." That's together with putting out the current financial fires, of course. "I'm hoping I can do two or three things at one time," McDemmond says.
It does appear that she'll have help.
WHAT COULD BE OBSERVED AT THE student assembly in Brown Hall demonstrates the "family feeling" that NSU people repeatedly invoke and that is likely to serve McDemmond well in her efforts to tame the financial crisis and serve the institution.
Antoinette Lambkin's admonition to young cap-wearers was only one example. We think of honors program director Page Laws, one of the few white administrators onstage, urging students with 3.0s to apply for her program but adding, "We love you all, whether you have that qualifying GPA or not." We think of presidential assistant Jacqueline Curtis chatting affably with, and introducing to us by name, maintenance workers as well as professional staff encountered on the way to and from the assembly.
The response evoked by Curtis is especially notable because she's new: brought in, like executive assistant Margo Taylor and vice president Arthur Jackson, by the new president, and a symbol of changes underway even before the dimensions of the current financial crisis became evident. McDemmond's predecessor, Harrison Wilson, had been in office for twenty-two years, a period during which the institution had grown and in many ways flourished. (Physical conditions, for example, appear better than at UMass.) But the benign patriarchy over which he presided appeared unequal to a push for the kind of excellence of which McDemmond is certain the students and faculty are capable.
"I do think there's a family feeling here," said McDemmond said last fall, when rumors of possible out-sourcing plans brought anxious protests from support staff some of whose families have worked on campus for generations. "I want to be part of this family. But I told them that when we look at the deficits, we'll look at all the options." She's not just talking tough to dining hall workers: in the local press in January it was noted that "one position [McDemmond] knows will be eliminated is vice president for operations ... the only vice president left who worked under Wilson."
The faculty, who could see increased teaching loads, the departure of part-time and adjunct colleagues even loss of full-time positions, as NSU restructures to build on strengths such as technology, entrepreneurship, and teacher education seem ready to follow McDemmond. "I think we've all had some concerns about the finances of the university," said one faculty member quoted in press accounts in January. "It was absolutely marvelous to have her up there to tell us. We are better prepared to deal with what is coming." And another, less formally: "We're in for a stormy voyage, but we have one hell of a captain."
