Then she ran into the Florida A&M University recruiting machine. Isaac Greene, a 1993 alumnus of FAMU's business school, corralled Simmons and 200 other top students from 50 Chicago high schools for a doughnuts-and-juice social at the Apostolic Church of God. Looming over the assembly, FAMU President Frederick Humphries - all 6'5" of him - mesmerized Simmons and the others with a fiery, evangelical-style stump speech. Dramatically calling students out of the crowd, he made on-the-spot scholarship offers totaling more than $500,000.
Simmons, who got one of the offers, was so impressed by Humphries' personal touch that she hugged him before she left the church. More important to FAMU, she says she may give up the lure and prestige of the Ivy League for small-town Tallahassee.
Back on the Florida A&M campus, just down the road from the state Capitol, Humphries chuckles while Simmons ponders her future. "Life was simple until she heard my spiel," says Humphries, 61, a 1957 FAMU grad who holds a doctorate in physical chemistry from the University of Pittsburgh.
The school's eighth president gloves his ego in a personable manner rooted in his upbringing in the rural Florida Panhandle town of Apalachicola, but he clearly relishes his reputation as a persuader. Since arriving at FAMU in 1985 after almost 11 sometimes controversial years heading Tennessee State University in Nashville, Humphries has defined his tenure with aggressive, relentless salesmanship. Some successful programs - the business school, for example - were underway before Humphries was named president. But when Humphries took over, enrollment, morale and facilities were declining, and he is credited with the academic equivalent of a corporate turnaround: Enrollment has doubled to nearly 11,000, for example, and average SAT scores have risen from less than 700 to 1,036. Morale is high, and the school has added $135 million in new buildings and improvements in the past decade.
Even if Simmons decides not to come to FAMU, Humphries will likely continue to harvest more than his share of top high school talent. Working through a network of 66 alumni association chapters around the country and hundreds of grads in cities without chapters, FAMU has attracted more of the country's top black high school students than Harvard in two of the last five years. Last year, the school graduated more African-Americans with bachelor's degrees than any school in America, including better-known historically black schools like Howard University.
Among this year's prizes is freshman Charles Fitzpatrick, who was recruited from the same Chicago high school as Simmons. Fitzpatrick, a chemical engineering major, scored 1350 on his SATs and had been accepted at Brown and Dartmouth. Despite prodding by his teachers to go to the Ivy League, he chose FAMU. "It was the best of both worlds, a good engineering school and an atmosphere I could thrive in," says Fitzpatrick.
And while FAMU has succeeded at marketing itself as a "historically black college" (about 7.5% of the student body is white), it has also succeeded at developing academic programs that can compete color-blind on both state and national levels. Over the past decade, as Humphries has been out hard-selling the school to prospective students, deans such as Rodner Wright at the School of Architecture and Sybil Mobley at the School of Business have crafted nationally recognized programs. The allied health and engineering programs are on the way up, and Dean Henry Lewis' School of Pharmacy is "a young aggressive research program turning out quality Ph.D.s,'' raves Dick Penna, head of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy. Time magazine, in conjunction with the Princeton Review, recently named FAMU its College of the Year.
The school's strategy has evolved in the fashion of a small company doing successful niche marketing: Compete against bigger, better-funded opponents using entrepreneurial vision, carefully cultivated relationships with clients and customers, and a sound product.
Yet despite regular accolades and national media attention, the institution remains relatively unknown in its home state, where FAMU is famous more for its marching band and past football glories than academic prowess. The reasons have, of course, much to do with race and lingering perceptions of predominantly black schools like FAMU as being noble but second-rate. For their part, Humphries and the school's leaders say they're content to be judged by the marketplace - the corporate world for which they prepare their graduates. And it's in that marketplace that FAMU has left many state universities behind and moved into the national ranks. Ford Motor Co., for example, has Florida A&M's business school on its short list of schools from which it hires managers and future executives, along with schools like the University of Chicago, Stanford and Harvard. FAMU, the only Florida state school on that list, "is a world-class learning institution," says Alex Trotman, Ford's chairman and chief executive officer, who visited the school last spring to recruit.
Salesman
For Humphries, the school's success begins and ends with recruiting, and he makes time to woo high school students on nearly every trip. "I do it whenever I can," he says. "We have to have great students." A few years ago, when Humphries and State University System Chancellor Charles Reed attended a meeting of land grant colleges in Kansas City, Reed invited Humphries to dinner with a handful of other college presidents. Humphries had other plans, however, and insisted that Reed take him to dinner with a handful of bright black teenagers. "He said, ?You're going to take me to dinner with a bunch of high school students and pay for it,'" laughs Reed. "You won't meet anyone who works harder than he does. He punishes himself."
Humphries' zeal occasionally lands him in trouble: One year, Reed recalls, Humphries committed $400,000 more in scholarships than the school had in its budget. Reed and Humphries convinced the Legislature to cough up the difference. "I really needed the money for out-of-state tuition waivers," Humphries says.
Part of Humphries' appeal is his personality. Although he can grow impatient when others don't see eye-to-eye with him, he's warm, affable and, when speaking publicly, not afraid to display the passionate flair of a preacher.
He makes no apologies for making race a strong part of his appeal to prospective students. His stump speech includes a quick history of the role of black colleges in producing national leaders; he hammers home how sparse the number of blacks in graduate programs would be without black colleges, especially in light of decisions, such as in California, to abandon affirmative action in college admissions.
"What would the world be like without black colleges?" Humphries asks rhetorically. "Look at what graduate education is like in America. The representation of blacks is miserable." Blacks earned 4.6% of the 41,610 doctorates granted in 1995, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, while Asians earned more than 13%. Of the total number of graduate degrees awarded in 1994, including master's degrees and those from professional schools such as law and medicine, blacks earned only 5.4%, according to a study published last year in Black Issues in Higher Education.
Florida A&M now grants more Ph.D.s to African-Americans in pharmacy than any school in America; it also offers Ph.D.s in electrical, chemical and mechanical engineering, entomology (a joint program with the University of Florida) and educational leadership. In the last two years, the pharmacy program edged ahead of all universities in the Southeast, including the University of Florida, in research funding from the National Institutes of Health. FAMU plans to add civil and industrial engineering Ph.D.s in a program run jointly with Florida State University.
Humphries' vision is to continue to add Ph.D.s, possibly next in computer science, and to beef up the school's offering of master's programs - there are 28, including public health, which was added this fall. Increasing the number of master's programs will help him boost the school's present enrollment of 11,000 to his target of 15,000 students by the year 2000.
The growth in the number of graduate programs is startling in the context of Florida history. When Humphries was graduated from FAMU in the late 1950s, he couldn't study for a doctorate at Florida A&M - or any Florida university, for that matter. Nathaniel Pilate, a classmate of Humphries' and a 1957 business grad who heads the alumni association, explains what the state did when blacks in Florida sought post-graduate studies: "If you applied to UF or FSU, they would pay to send you out of state." Pilate got a graduate degree from the University of Oklahoma and recently retired as a NASA deputy director.
Another, more recent, slight came in 1968 when the Legislature closed FAMU's fledgling law school, transferring its funding to a new law school at Florida State across town. "We're still very upset," says Arthenia Joyner, who was in the last law school class to graduate in 1968 and the first black female to practice law in Hillsborough County. Jesse McCrary Jr., a 1965 grad and Florida's first black secretary of state in 1978, says FAMU's law school was first opened and then shut to keep blacks from power. "The law school was open to avoid having black people attend University of Florida law school, which was the incubator of Florida's political power," says McCrary. "Had it survived, it would have been the same kind of star as the business school is."
In 1984 the state allowed the school to grant a Ph.D. in pharmacy, but not without a struggle: Even after a unanimous vote by the Board of Regents in favor of the program, the state's Postsecondary Education Planning Commission opposed it, arguing that the University of Florida already offered a pharmacy doctorate. The regents finally pushed it through, and the pharmacy degree marked a turning point for the school. With few Ph.D.s available at other black schools, and virtually none in hard sciences, the degree put FAMU "in the real ball game," says Israel Tribble, an associate vice chancellor at the time and president of the Florida Education Fund today. As it added programs, FAMU also has cultivated corporations looking for a strong pool of talented black employees. A core of 130 companies, including 3M, Mead and Boeing, have helped create a $30 million pool for scholarships and endowed professorships. When Trotman visited last spring, he left a check for $500,000. "It provides the company an opportunity to get minorities in significant numbers," says Bob Smith, a Ford controller who recruits new grads for its finance and accounting operations each year. "We're trying to create a more diverse work force."
Issues
FAMU's campus reflects the school's expansion. Scattered among its stately brick buildings and lawns clustered on the highest point in Tallahassee are $135 million in new buildings and improvements, including a planned $25 million school of journalism that's being funded in part by a $3 million grant from the Knight Foundation. Another $46 million in new projects is underway.
But for all the success, FAMU must still deal with issues that stem from its uniqueness and growth. One question is whether the school's appeal to ethnicity will continue to sell in the future. Some believe that the role of historically black colleges will - even should - diminish or change as social barriers fall. Even some potential students, like Michelle Simmons' classmate at Kenwood Academy in Chicago, Carille Guthrie, say they wouldn't find much intrinsic value in attending a predominantly black school. But others, Simmons included, say American society is still unfriendly enough for young African-Americans that schools like FAMU offer them a comfort factor they won't find elsewhere: "I don't have a problem blending in, but (at FAMU) I wouldn't feel the need to keep stuff in because how people will react," Simmons says.
Humphries concedes that selling FAMU based on its historical importance to African-Americans can be a hard pitch to youngsters born well after the civil rights movement. "It's a point that has to be made with them over and over," he says. "They're unaware of history."
While committed to black students, Humphries says he also has been trying to draw more whites, who account for about 7.5% of the student body. He says the school's programs in physical therapy, pharmacy and allied health help draw whites. And he shrugs off criticism from some FAMU students who say there are now too many whites. "We have to be concerned about white students coming to FAMU, just as white schools should be concerned about blacks," Humphries says.
Some FAMU students worry that the school's focus on elite students is pushing aside the school's original mission of boosting a disadvantaged black population. Humphries answers that the school has a commitment to fill 30% of each freshman class with students who didn't meet admissions standards and then provide support to lift their academic skills. "We want to keep our commitment to all the kids in the community," he insists.
The school's lagging graduation rate also has been a sore spot. The Board of Regents measures graduation rates by counting how many students graduate within six years after first enrolling. By that yardstick, FAMU's graduation rate is 43%, compared with 54% for the state system as a whole. Humphries says the time line should be 10 years for FAMU because so many of its students leave and then re-enter school for reasons of financial need. "What kids do is they drop out, earn money and come back," Humphries explains. His own background, he says, makes him sensitive to those considerations: His father died when he was 8, and Humphries and his siblings worked to supplement their mother's earnings as a maid, by taking jobs ranging from waxing floors to ripping the heads off shrimp at 40 cents per five pounds.
Another sensitive issue is FAMU's large number of out-of-state students. FAMU's 22% non-resident enrollment exceeds other institutions. By comparison, non-Floridians at University of Florida account for 11%, Florida State 12%, and University of South Florida 6%.
With state coffers covering 75% of the cost of education and space growing ever tighter, some lawmakers don't want an out-of-stater taking the seat of a Florida resident, says Board of Regents spokesman Alan Stonecipher, who adds that the Board of Regents acknowledges FAMU's role in recruiting top blacks from around the country.
With the school's rapid growth, overcrowded classrooms and scarce parking for students have become common complaints, but that has been the case at most other Florida schools. This fall, FAMU opens a new classroom building to accommodate 1,300 students, but the projected growth in enrollment will keep classroom space at a premium for some time.
Humphries also has been chastised at times for lack of attention to administrative details, particularly for problems in administering financial aid. "The problems seemed to drag on without systemic change," Stonecipher once noted. But Humphries says he has made wholesale changes to financial aid personnel and software, and Stonecipher agrees the university's handling of financial matters generally has improved.
Humphries says he wants to return to teaching in five or six years, raising the question of succession. Insiders speculate that pharmacy dean Henry Lewis, 47, or James Ammons, 44, provost and vice president over academic affairs since 1995, are lead contenders. But with the university's profile so high nationally, the field likely will open up. McCrary, 60, says he's considering going after the post when the time comes.
Regardless whether the school's next president can match Humphries' energy and marketing skill, his legacy seems secure. "The FAMU story is one of the greatest stories in Florida education, maybe American education. To see FAMU go from an unwanted stepchild to become the leading producer of the smartest black minds in the country is incredible," says Pilate.