Executive Profile
Coming Home
Bill Muse, the new ECU
chancellor, returns to the state
where his management style and academic vigor were born
By Kevin Brafford
The
next time state officials need a spokesperson to testify about
the virtues of calling North Carolina home, they would do well to look
up Bill Muse. True, East Carolina University’s 10th chancellor has only called
Greenville home since Aug. 1, the date he arrived to replace the
retiring Richard Eakin. But in reality, Muse and his wife, Marlene,
have kept their eyes on our state since he came to Appalachian State
University for three years beginning in 1970 as the founding dean for
the university’s college of business.
No doubt the companies that produce the self-adhesive address labels
count William V. Muse among their best customers. When he moved to
Boone at age 31, it already marked his fourth professional stop.
Excluding ASU, there have been seven permanent change-of-addresses
since then.
If the Muses are to move again, it won’t require turning in their
North Carolina license plates. While the chancellor demonstrates the
energy of a 30-year-old, he turns 63 on April 7. Had he said no to
ECU’s offer and remained at Auburn University, where he had been
president since 1992, he likely would have retired when his contract
expired last month.
“That was the track I was on,” he says. “I had achieved what I
set out to do at Auburn and I knew that my contract was about to run
out. The average tenure for a president or a chancellor at a major
university is four or five years, and I had been there for nine.”
He and Marlene already had North Carolina on their mind. “Of all the
places we’d live, North Carolina most appealed to us,” he says.
“We like the people, we like the geography, we like the contrast
between the mountains and seashore, and we like its aggressive
leadership. It offers so much.”
Then ECU offered more. “We had good people in our mix of
candidates,” says Greenville attorney Phil Dixon, who chaired the
chancellor’s search committee. “But Bill impressed everybody, and
we must have impressed him. The bottom line is, I think we got lucky.
The frequent packing of
the bags that Muse has done in moving from one college town to another
might indicate to some a sense of discontent or restlessness. Neither
could be further from the truth.
“I’ve always thought of myself as a builder — an organization
person,” he says. “Almost every job that I’ve accepted has been
to take over an organization and attempt to take it to a place that is
different from and better than it presently was. Once you accomplish
those goals, you move on to other challenges. And in some cases, such
as the experience at Appalachian, it was building something from
scratch.”
Of all Muse’s stops, it is the time in Boone that he remembers most
fondly. “The years at Appalachian State shaped my administrative
career perhaps more than any other,” he says.
Muse was an associate professor of marketing at Ohio University when
he heard about the ASU post. “I knew so little about it when I went
there — in fact, when I first heard of Appalachian, I thought it was
in West Virginia.
“The school was still thought of as a teacher’s college, and I was
intrigued by the challenge of starting a business school. Looking
back, I can’t believe I did it. Here I was, a department head at
Ohio University; I had just turned 31 and I had tenure. I’ve often
said that when you’re that age, you think you can conquer the world.
That’s what I must have thought.”
So he, Marlene and their three young children left security for
insecurity, the Midwest for the Southeast and old friends for new
friends. Starting from scratch, Muse had to develop a curriculum, hire
faculty, organize a school and develop a relationship with the
state’s business community.
“I probably worked harder than I’ve ever worked in my life,” he
says. “I was a one-man department there for awhile. I came down the
mountain, went up the mountain, came down the mountain, went up the
mountain. Everyone that I brought in for an interview, I had to pick
up at the airport.”
Muse’s vision shaped what is now considered one of the top business
schools in North Carolina. He recruited business executives from
throughout the state to spend a semester on the faculty teaching
courses in their area of specialization, and he required each student
to spend a semester as an intern.
“It had a dual purpose,” he says of the students’ internships.
“It got the school welcomed and brought recognition, and it gave the
students real experience and a leg up on getting a job. Up until that
point, Appalachian State was not a place where a business would go to
hire an accountant, a banker or a marketing specialist.”
Muse’s business trips led to pleasure trips. He’d see an area in
the state new to him while out recruiting, then hurry home and tell
Marlene of places that the family should visit. “We always went to
Wrightsville Beach when the children were little because we had a
friend who had a house,” Marlene says. “We got to see a lot of the
state, and we absolutely loved it.
“And we loved the people, because they were especially nice. Bill
took to them and they took to him. That’s the way it’s always been
with him. He makes friends easily.”
Muse was born in Marks,
Miss., a little town in the northwestern reaches of the state known as
the Mississippi Delta. His father was a minister in the Church of God
and his mother a homemaker charged with raising seven sons who were 26
years apart.
Bill was the youngest, and even as a child he grew accustomed to
changing addresses. “My father was a wonderful man and very
definitely a community leader,” he says. “He’d get a new church
about every two years — that was normal for his work back then —
and we’d have to move. It certainly was an interesting way to grow
up, and I wouldn’t change it for anything.
“Remember, this was the 1950s in rural Mississippi — you had to
drive long distances sometimes just to find a paved road. For a lot of
my growing up, we didn’t have electricity or running water. By any
standard, we had a very low income, but that’s just the way it was
in that part of the country.
“Even so, my brothers and I always had something to eat, we always
had something to wear and we always had a roof over our heads. In
those towns we lived, there always was a great sense of community.
Everyone was working to make a living for themselves — by farming,
primarily. There was a lot of pride.”
Most kids find one or two outlets for their energy, and Muse’s was
baseball. “I used to drive my mother crazy,” he says, “because
I’d get an old ball and throw it against the house acting like I was
fielding grounders.”
On many a summer’s night, an AM transistor radio was his best
friend. He’d slowly turn the dial in search of a big-league game,
hoping to find out the latest on his beloved Detroit Tigers and their
All-Star third baseman George Kell, a native of nearby Swifton, Ark.
— “just across the Mississippi River from where I grew up.”
Muse excelled as an infielder in high school and played a couple of
seasons as an undergraduate at Northwestern State University in
Natchitoches, La. Between his freshman and sophomore years, he was
invited to a St. Louis Cardinals’ two-day tryout camp. “I was
going to be the next George Kell,” he says, “but I knew after the
first day of camp that I was outmatched. I was a good fielder who
could hold on to most anything I could get to, but I didn’t have any
speed or power.”
Despite that disappointment, this story has a good ending. Muse kept
track of Kell, who followed his Hall of Fame career with a stint as
one of the Tigers’ radio broadcasters. One weekend each summer, Muse
flies to Detroit to take in a weekend series. A few years ago, he came
across Kell’s biography at an airport bookstore. “I bought it and
finished reading it in a couple of days,” he says.
When Muse returned home, he wrote Kell a letter, “telling him how
much I admired him. I got back from him a three-page handwritten
letter, and he also sent me several mementos — a couple of baseball
cards, some autographed things.
“He said, ‘If you’re ever in Arkansas, come see me.’ Well, I
was at Auburn at the time and one year we were playing Arkansas in
football in Fayetteville. He and his wife met Marlene and me for
dinner in Little Rock. I don’t remember when we ate; I just remember
that we talked baseball for hours.”
They’re still penpals, writing each other several times a year. “I
have a picture in my office of the two of us together,” Muse says.
“I’m friends with one of my heroes. How neat is that?”
Muse still catches the Tigers in Detroit every summer and takes in any
baseball game he can find. And he adorned a uniform as recently as
1989. That was the year he turned 50, and for a present, his wife and
children sent him to Lakeland, Fla., to the Tigers’ fantasy camp.
“It was something he’d talked about wanting to do for years,”
says Marlene, “but he never would have spent the money on himself.
So we did it for him.”
Muse considers his George Kell baseball cards among his most prized
possessions. He owns another card as well, and this one stays in his
wallet. It’s of Bill Muse, replete in a Tigers’ uniform. On the
card underneath his name where a player’s position is listed,
Muse’s reads “President.”
Muse graduated from
Northwestern State in 1960 with a degree in accounting. He entered the
University of Arkansas that year and earned an MBA in business
administration. He stayed at Arkansas to work on his Ph.D., teaching
business communications courses along the way, and his dissertation
topic provided a glimpse of his genius. One of Muse’s professors,
Robert B. Hay, was touting the concept of the universal style of
management in organizations outside of business.
Muse had been a member of Tau Kappa Epsilon (TEK), and he convinced
Hay and TEK to commission a study on the effectiveness of management
practices in social fraternities. “In those days when you talked
about managing something, everyone thought you were talking about
business firms,” Muse says. “They didn’t think that other
organizations could and should often use the same kind of
practices.”
The fraternity, which was headquartered in Indianapolis, paid his
salary and travel expenses as he toured 60 university campuses in the
Southeast and Midwest during the 1963-64 academic year. “No one had
ever done this,” he says. “I had six different criteria and I
judged them on 33 different measures of management — it was very
sophisticated statistical analysis at that time.”
He returned to Indianapolis the following summer to compile his data.
Not surprisingly, he found that social fraternities that were managed
better were more successful. And to make a good year ever better, he
fell in love and married Marlene Munden.
She was the secretary to the executive of TEK, and every two years the
fraternity hosted a national conference that culminated with a dance.
“In those days, and this seemed so innocent, you could arrange
dates,” she says. “My boss said that was one of my duties for this
dance, and I was too dumb to know any better.
“This was about 400 boys in all, and I found girls at Butler
University and other places. Anyway, I got them all dates and I never
even thought about getting myself one. My boss asked me didn’t I
want to go, and who with, and I thought of Bill Muse — he didn’t
have a date either. So I asked him to go with me.”
They were married in the fall of ’64 and headed South when Muse
accepted a position as an assistant professor of industrial management
at Georgia Tech. “I thought we’d stay in Atlanta forever,”
Marlene says. “I wasn’t used to moving much, but it was normal for
him. When opportunities came, we followed them.”
That meant a move to Athens, Ohio, in 1965 when Muse went to work as
an assistant professor of marketing at Ohio University. Promotions
came quickly, as did children — first Amy, then Ellen, and lastly
Van.
The next move was Boone in 1970. Three years later, he began a
six-year stint as dean of the college of business administration at
the University of Nebraska at Omaha. During 1977-78, he served as a
presidential interchange executive assigned to the office of education
in the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
Muse was recruited to Texas in 1979 as dean of the college of business
administration at Texas A&M University, leading the fifth-largest
business school in the nation. In 1983, he was promoted to vice
chancellor for academic programs and planning for the Texas A&M
University System. After a year as the A&M System’s chief
academic officer, Muse was named president of the University of Akron,
a post he held until being elected president of Auburn in 1992.
Running Auburn
University, with 22,000 students on the main campus and 7,000 more at
a campus in the state capital of Montgomery, wasn’t without its
problems. Naturally, that made the job more appealing.
“Race relations were tearing the student body apart, the football
program was under NCAA investigation and we were operating at about an
$8 million deficit,” Muse says. “There was plenty to be done.”
So he did it. During his tenure, he was credited with successfully
managing major reductions in state support, increasing campus
diversity, developing a university Honors College and improving
faculty personnel policies and relationships. He also boosted private
support to the university, leading a capital campaign that raised more
than $200 million and significantly increased the institution’s
endowment.
As the chancellor at ECU, he’ll face a similar challenge,
comfortable as always in wearing hats both as a business man and
educator. “The kind of situations that a president of a university
encounters are very similar to that of any CEO of any organization,”
he says. “Almost every issue that I deal with draws upon my training
and experience in business.”
Phil Dixon says Muse’s ability to think outside the box appealed to
ECU’s search committee. “He created a program at Auburn called a
bachelor of technology degree,” Dixon says. “It used to be that
you couldn’t transfer from a two-year technical college to a
four-year college. Now, students can get their general college the
last two years, which opened up a lot more doors. Given the great
community college system we have in North Carolina, we thought that
kind of vision would be a great asset.”
Molly Broad, the president of the UNC System, agrees. “Bill brings a
wealth of high-level administrative experience accumulated in leading
public university settings,” she says. “Over the course of his
career, he has consistently demonstrated strong leadership and
strategic planning skills, a commitment to academic excellence, and a
deep understanding of the special relationship between public
institutions and the regions they were founded to serve.”
Dixon says it’s a critical time for ECU, which will celebrate its
100th anniversary in 2007. “Bill’s going to get the chance to
build an entirely new medical center campus,” he says. “We have so
much room to grow, and we have the resources in which to do it —
we’ll have $250 million to spend over the next six years.”
That money will come in part from a five-year major capital campaign
that the university will soon launch. Muse has promised to stay at the
school until its completion, at which point, “I might want to
finally activate those plans for retirement.”
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