The Florida A&M University president had not slept well. National accreditors had just voted on whether his embattled school should remain on probation, and the guy on the line had just given him the verdict.
Ammons, ever polite, said thank you, then proceeded to a meeting with his top staff. Purposely, he delayed the bottom line until "they were really getting irritated with me." Then he told them.
Probation, lifted.
"There was just jubilee in that room," Ammons said.
Within hours, jubilee spilled out to the rest of the FAMU community.
The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools' Commission on Colleges concluded that the nation's largest historically black university has fixed the financial management and leadership problems that have plagued it for years.
The decision, made in Asheville, N.C., sent a clear message to anyone who has followed recent headlines: FAMU has turned a corner.
Said FAMU trustee Daryl Parks: "We no longer have this cloud."
The university already was drenched in negative publicity when it was put on probation last June, the first step SACS takes before revoking a college's accreditation.
The SACS commission had concluded FAMU was not complying with 10 standards for financial accountability.
The implications were ominous: Without accreditation, an institution's students are not eligible for federal financial aid. Recruitment suffers. The value of a degree plummets. No Florida public university has ever had its accreditation stripped.
The probation decision followed a steady drumbeat of other bad news, including a state audit that found millions of dollars in questionable expenses, shoddy bookkeeping and lost inventory. Higher education officials assembled a task force to watchdog FAMU finances. Lawmakers grew angry.
All of it was a reminder of the instability that roiled FAMU after longtime president Frederick Humphries stepped down in 2001. And all of it highlighted how far FAMU had fallen.
Ten years prior, FAMU had been Time magazine's College of the Year. Now, with probation, it was joining a list of troubled institutions that most people had never heard of.