THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1997, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, February 9, 1997 TAG: 9702090045
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY PHILIP WALZER, STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: BOCA RATON, FLA. LENGTH: 289 lines
A few days after Marie McDemmond was born, her mother died of toxemia.
Before she was a teenager, her father was killed in an accidental shooting in the New Orleans restaurant he owned.
At 7 years old, Marie Valentine McDemmond was an orphan.
Rather than give up, she was inspired by those family tragedies. Her philosophy: ``Hey, there ain't anybody behind you, kid, if you don't do for yourself.''
Raised by her mother's aunt, she became a scrappy tomboy who readily got into fights. When she grew up, she channeled that drive into her career as a fiercely ambitious college administrator eager to run her own school.
McDemmond rose high, becoming the first woman to lead the Southern Association of College and University Business Officers. And the first named chief financial officer in Florida's state university system.
She wanted more.
In December, she got it. Norfolk State University's board appointed her to succeed President Harrison B. Wilson this summer. She will be the first woman to lead NSU - and the first to run a state-supported university in Virginia.
McDemmond, who turned 51 on Tuesday, has been vice president in charge of finance at Florida Atlantic University since 1990. Based on interviews with her and several officials who have worked with her, this is what Norfolk State can expect from its next president:
A bottom-line executive who expects statistical support for any proposal and likes to shrink expenses as much as possible.
A talkative, vibrant woman equally at ease mingling with administrators or secretaries.
A hard-nosed boss who delegates plenty but demands the best from her employees. If they don't perform, they're out.
A creative manager not averse to trying unorthodox approaches to get the job done, whether it's battling a union to privatize the maintenance operation or lobbying the university foundation to fund a dorm for females eligible for financial aid.
``Marie does not sit and yawn,'' said Dennis A. Hannon, Florida Atlantic's assistant vice president for finance, who works for McDemmond. ``She's here to make improvements. . . . She puts a lot of pressure on herself to perform, and she expects you to do the same. She doesn't like second-rate.''
What struck Al Bielen, a former associate vice president under McDemmond, was her ethical backbone. ``Marie deals with moral correctness first and political expediency second,'' said Bielen, now a consultant with another Florida school.
Anthony J. Catanese, the president of Florida Atlantic, said: ``She's easy to work with, but I would predict some big changes'' at Norfolk State. ``I would certainly think she's going to shake up the administration.''
During a recent meeting with McDemmond's staff, Hannon discussed a statistical project he's running on her request. Using data from the National Association of College and University Business Officers, the project compares costs at Florida Atlantic with those at more than two dozen schools nationwide.
Florida Atlantic came out looking more efficient than most schools in nearly all measures, including operating cost per student and custodial cost per gross square foot. The results are partly due to the state's relatively small allocation to higher education, McDemmond said, but they also reflect Florida Atlantic's ``mean and lean operation.''
She'd like to start the same ``benchmarking'' procedure at NSU. ``If we put a little more time on the front end,'' McDemmond said, ``we might be able to . Florida Atlantic's general counsel: ``She's always very conscious of the taxpayer; she has a duty to preserve the resources of the state.''
As the university's chief fiscal officer, McDemmond oversees a $189 million budget. University officials say that since McDemmond took over, criticisms have virtually disappeared from state audits. But Florida Atlantic has overestimated enrollment projections, McDemmond said, and must return about $1.5 million to the state this year. McDemmond said the estimates were made by a division not under her control.
Despite Catanese's glowing praise for McDemmond, her job duties were reduced - and her title changed from vice president for finance and chief operating officer to vice president for finance and chief fiscal officer - last year. Areas such as construction, the bookstore and computing were parceled out to other administrators.
That, the president said, is not a reflection on McDemmond's performance but an acknowledgment that her responsibilities were too broad, especially with Florida Atlantic's five-year, $250 million building schedule. ``Frankly,'' he said, ``you need someone spending all of their time (overseeing construction) when you have that large a construction program.'' For her part, McDemmond said she was relieved: ``The way we were going, I couldn't keep up with it.''
McDemmond revealed some clues to her style of management during the recent staff meeting. She methodically covered all the bases but easily slid in and out of personal chitchat about employees and their relatives. She's that way outside the office, too - and with workers who are lower than her on the totem pole.
``Two weeks? Three weeks?'' she asked admissions clerk Larry Greenbaum in a hallway on the first floor of the administration building. (He's nearing his 10-year anniversary with the school.) Outside, a clerk in the controller's office yelled to McDemmond, ``Where's your angel pin?'' (The woman, McDemmond explained, loves angels.)
``She's not the type of administrator who forgets there are real people working for her or with her,'' said Jay Semmel, the university's inspector general, who recently received a condolence note from McDemmond after the death of his father-in-law.
McDemmond said the great-aunt who raised her ``told me a long time ago, `You can catch more flies with honey than you can with vinegar.' If you let people know you care about them, you get much more out of them. They're much better motivated toward their work.''
She's also a delegator. It's Hannon, not McDemmond, who's doing all the statistical work for the benchmarking project. During the meeting, she regularly handed assignments to her staff. ``You know my thing,'' she said at one point. ``If I die tomorrow, we've got to have somebody else.''
McDemmond's rationale is simple: ``You can't do it all yourself.'' But she added, ``When I delegate, I know what to follow up on.'' She regularly e-mails or phones people before their deadlines to make sure their job gets done.
If it doesn't, there can be trouble. ``She gets very irritated when people don't do what they're supposed to do,'' said Dorothy M. Stetson, a political science professor who served with McDemmond on a task force on the status of women.
``If I can't work with people or get them to produce,'' McDemmond said, they get fired. She said she has dismissed about six mid-level administrators at Florida Atlantic, including the university controller.
Charles B. Reed, chancellor of the Florida university system, considers McDemmond ``a leader of her peers,'' primarily because of her decision to privatize the maintenance operation on the Boca Raton campus in 1995. It was the first major privatization effort among Florida universities.
``She made me a believer'' in privatization, said Catanese, the university's president. ``No one was happy with the (previous) service; it was expensive and not very timely.''
Some Virginia universities, including Norfolk State, have privatized operations such as bookstores and food services. The big difference in Florida is that the maintenance crew was unionized. The union heavily lobbied against the change, saying it would deprive workers of job security and good wages.
The school went ahead with the move, contracting out its operations to Ogden Facility Services, now known as UNICCO. A report sent to Reed last month declared the first year of privatization a success. Florida Atlantic, it said, came close to reaching its projection of a 21 percent cost reduction: The school cut its maintenance budget by $242,000, or 20.5 percent. That money, Catanese said, has been put back into instruction.
Roughly half of the 28 union workers, including plumbers and electricians, transferred to other university departments or were hired by UNICCO, the report said. Some have since retired or voluntarily left.
Said Catanese: ``Things get done faster (with UNICCO) because they use the bonus and incentive system. They can do things we could never do as state employees.''
McDemmond also has no misgivings: ``Any way we could save money to improve the infrastructure or the classroom, we had to do it.''
Officials of the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees in Florida, which represented the workers, did not return calls. Frederick Hoffman, a math professor who is president of the Faculty Senate, has a more skeptical take on the move.
He perceives a ``slight negative change'' in the quality of maintenance and has yet to see solid proof of the savings. Yet even Hoffman grudgingly praises McDemmond.
``I am not aware of any serious problems that have been caused in her office,'' he said. ``While I can't say she's this wonderful person, I feel she is superior to her predecessors. If I had a problem, I would not hesitate to talk to her.''
The bookshelves in McDemmond's office reflect her interests and ambitions: ``Financing Higher Education,'' ``This Was Harlem,'' ``How to Work a Room,'' ``The Promotable Woman.''
When she was named vice president, Catanese recalled, she told him that she was even more promotable. Her goal was to be president of a historically black college. And she told him one of the routes she'd mapped to get there was to rise in the national university business officers association - on whose board she now sits. ``She had a very clear plan; she never lost track of that,'' he said.
But McDemmond wasn't always aiming for the top.
At Xavier University of Louisiana, the only black Catholic college in the country, she wasn't voted the ``most ambitious'' student. But, she added with a laugh, ``I was voted the one with the best legs.''
Before she graduated, she got married and had a son, Alan, now a 29-year-old cook in New Orleans. (Her other son, Ricky, is a 16-year-old in 10th grade.)
She received her bachelor's degree in secondary education in 1968 and began teaching social studies in a New Orleans junior high school.
It was her dissatisfaction with the red tape and regular classroom interruptions that triggered her desire to become an administrator. ``I wanted to be in charge so I could cut the crap out and get to the learning experience,'' she said.
She received a master's degree in educational administration from the University of New Orleans, assuming she'd return to public schools. But her then-husband landed a job outside New York, and she ended up director of minority student programs at the College of New Rochelle.
She spent eight years in New York state at a handful of positions, including business officer of the Bronx Psychiatric Center. McDemmond began narrowing her focus to financial matters. ``I knew money controls,'' she said. ``Since I wanted to be in control, I knew I had to learn about money.''
From 1979 to 1984, she was in Massachusetts, first as budget director of the community college system and, later, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she received her doctorate in higher education administration and finance. Then it was on to Atlanta, where she served as vice president for budget and finance at Clark Atlanta University and assistant vice president for finance at Emory.
In Atlanta, she met a visiting businessman, Roy Mouton, who became her fourth husband. She moved back to Louisiana, where Mouton lived, to help run his business - selling steel products - and served as assistant professor at the University of New Orleans, teaching courses in higher education and finance. But his business was slow and she yearned to return to the executive ranks, so they moved to Boca Raton, where Mouton relocated his business, in 1988.
She has had more than a dozen jobs, but McDemmond vows not to leave NSU anytime soon for a new challenge. ``I always got offered things to do that were exciting,'' she said. ``. . .But now I'm going to be 51. I would like to be president of Norfolk State for 10 years. I don't want to go anywhere else.''
McDemmond voices the same commitment to her 9 1/2-year-old marriage to Mouton, which she says will endure. She speaks philosophically, yet matter-of-factly, about her three previous marriages. ``I'm a very strong woman and I've grown a lot in my life,'' she said. ``. . . I kept doing it till I got it right.''
Florida Atlantic, founded in 1964, is the fastest-growing university in the state system, with seven branches. The biggest branch is in Boca Raton - an airy 850-acre campus with palm trees and colorless stone and concrete buildings.
Because her field is finance, McDemmond has not had broad interaction with the university's 19,000 students and 700 professors. Ten students randomly interviewed said they were unfamiliar with her. Timothy O. Lenz, the former president of the university's chapter of the United Faculty of Florida union, also said he hadn't dealt with her.
Because McDemmond has never overseen an academic department, ``I see Marie spending a lot of time getting to know that part of her house,'' said Carla L. Coleman, vice president for university advancement.
McDemmond feels completely prepared: ``I understand the total scope of the university. I have worked for student affairs and university relations. I have been a professor. I clearly have a management background. Just because someone has been a good academic or a good dean doesn't mean they will be a good university president.''
Even though she hasn't had contact with many students, those who know McDemmond speak effusively of her. Student president John Kirlew Jr. praised her for her willingness to spend time with student leaders - even when it was to explain the rejection of a plan for a new student union building. ``As a university president, she'll walk around campus,'' he said. ``She'll be a president who students know and like.''
And McDemmond has a 17-member fan club in the newest dorm on campus, which she helped get built. The dorm, which opened last fall, is for female students who are eligible for financial aid and maintain a B average; room charges are waived.
The dorm was the idea of the Florida Federation of Business and Professional Women. The federation had raised $150,000 for the building, but needed an extra $200,000 from the university. Florida Atlantic's foundation wasn't interested - until McDemmond interceded. ``I firmly believe if it was not for her, we would not have that house today,'' said Nancy Lee Hurlbert, the past president of the federation. ``Once she's sold on an idea, she'll do whatever it takes to get it done.''
Students in the dorm say McDemmond has always been involved - whether to throw housewarming parties or ensure that repairs are completed. ``She's a second mother to all of us,'' said Lois Gray, a junior majoring in elementary education.
Rosanna Star Berzok, a doctoral candidate in education, has been McDemmond's graduate/research assistant for the last year. Berzok assists in preparing presentations and has been permitted to attend - and participate in - the benchmarking discussions. ``She allows a student to grow,'' Berzok said. ``A lot of people say, `I want to help students.' She walks the talk.''
McDemmond also goes out of her way to help others, said Stetson, the political science professor. One week a year, she teaches at Bryn Mawr and Wellesley Colleges as part of Project HERS - helping female college administrators better understand finances. At Florida Atlantic, she started a literacy program five years ago to help employees learn to read and write or get their high school equivalency certificates.
It's another idea McDemmond might take with her to Norfolk. ``Education is for everyone,'' she said. ``If there are those people in Norfolk and we are not educating them, we have to find a way to reach them. You don't know one day what they might be.''
Just like the feisty little orphan who grew up to be a college president. ILLUSTRATION: Color photo by GARY I. ROTHSTEIN
Dr. Marie V. McDemmond
GARY I. ROTHSTEIN
Marie V. McDemmond, center, is known for delegating responsibility
to her Florida Atlantic staff, which includes, from left, Rene
Pelaez, Alan Levine, Kathi Danes, Karin Lash and Dennis A. Hannon.
``Marie does not sit and yawn,'' says Hannon. ``She's here to make
improvements.''
Photo Courtesy of Marie McDemmond
By age 9, Marie McDemmond had lost both parents. But the tragedy
only served as inspiration to the once-scrappy tomboy who, on July
1, will become the first woman to run a state-supported university
in Virginia.
Photo Courtesy of Marie McDemmond
When Marie V. McDemmond was only 7, her father, George, shown
holding her in 1948, was killed. She was raised by her mother's
aunt. McDemmond became interested in administration while she was
teaching at a junior high school.
KEYWORDS: NORFOLK STATE UNIVERSITY PRESIDENT PROFILE
BIOGRAPHY