Michael V. Martin President

Michael Martin describes his life as a series of good breaks.

One such break, he says, occurred while he was an undergraduate student – the first in his immediate family to attend college – and it set the course of his career. He became an economist because the day he went to declare a major, he was in a hurry and the only major without a line was economics.

“It was supply and demand,” he recalls with a laugh. “I was in demand, they had a supply, so I ended up being an econ major and I really liked it. That was a good break.”

Every defining event seems to fit that category as Martin scans his personal history, from his recovery from polio at age 5 to his recent appointment as president of New Mexico State University.

“I always tell my children to plot out their lives and be strategic, and then I contradict that by saying I have simply been the recipient of some good breaks that put me on paths that I am awfully thankful I have taken,” he says. “Many people have been very helpful to me.”

Some of those helpful people might challenge the Michael Martin Theory of Good Breaks. Take John Lombardi, former president of the University of Florida, where Martin served as vice president for six years before assuming the NMSU presidency on July 1.

“One of the reasons we were so pleased to have him come to Florida was his easily identifiable leadership ability,” says Lombardi, who now is chancellor of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Martin was vice president for agriculture and natural resources at Florida, leading the university’s Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, which has more than 3,000 employees statewide. But his leadership extended beyond his unit, according to Lombardi.

“Over the years he demonstrated a breadth of vision that encompassed the whole university, and he had an exceptional capacity to see where each part of the institution fit into the success of the whole,” he recalls. “These skills, along with his charm and obvious brilliance, made him a clear candidate for president of some very fortunate institution, and you guys won the prize.”

Blue-collar Background

Martin grew up in the Cuyuna iron range of northeast Minnesota. His mother’s family all worked in the mines. His father worked in the mines in the summers and spent the winters hauling logs.

As a youth, Martin figured he would follow the family’s blue-collar traditions: “Play softball until you’re 42, bowl in the winter, hunt in the fall, work in the mines, live that life and enjoy the community.”

Then the mines ran out and the family was forced to move. Sometimes the good breaks don’t look so good at the time.

His father found work as a diesel mechanic in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area. Young Mike found himself enrolled in “a very good suburban school system where it was a standard expectation that you would go to college.”

The public school system “fundamentally and irrevocably transformed my life,” he says now. “I’m a deep and passionate believer that a great society makes those kinds of investments through public education, and I’ve devoted the balance of my life to trying to be a participant in it.”

Martin worked his way through undergraduate studies at Mankato State College, now known as Minnesota State University.

“I went to work for a seed corn company and that introduced me to agriculture. That got me interested in the whole economics of cycles and peculiarities of agriculture ... and that job in turn introduced me to a farmer who let me work on his farm, and I found that very interesting.”

That was another good break, he says now. And so was meeting his future wife, Jan, an education major at Mankato State. They married after graduation; Jan became a teacher and Mike returned to Mankato State for a master’s degree in economics. But he still had not considered an academic career.

The Call of Academia

“Luck gave me a chance to be an instructor at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire, which I started in the fall of 1971,” he says. “I hadn’t intended to pursue a career in higher education, but I so enjoyed the campus, I so enjoyed the students, I so enjoyed my colleagues, that about the second year in that job I concluded that by good fortune I had found my career path.”

This discovery led Martin to the University of Minnesota, where he received his Ph.D. in applied economics in 1977. He spent 15 years as a faculty member at Oregon State University, including a stint as Faculty Senate president, four years as chair of the Natural Resources Trade Consortium and a year as interim head of the Department of Agricultural and Resource Economics.

He returned to the University of Minnesota in 1992 and rose through the ranks to become dean of the College of Agricultural, Food and Environmental Sciences and vice president for agricultural policy.

Martin moved to Florida in 1998. Those who worked closely with him there describe him as an energetic and visionary leader who believes a land-grant university should be responsive and relevant to people’s needs.

“He’s a fun guy to be around, and probably one of the quickest, smartest people I’ve ever met,” says Joe Joyce, executive associate vice president of the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences, the unit led by Martin.

Joyce and Martin both were finalists for the vice presidency at Florida. “I was the internal candidate,” Joyce says. “When he got selected the first person he called was me. It’s been a great relationship from that day forward. He’s very supportive of people who work for him.”

A Tradition of being Non-traditional

Michael V. Martin “I don't think of the United States as a melting pot; I think of it as a quilt, and you have all these different kinds of people who make it interesting. And in some resepects New Mexico is the leading edge of the construction of that new social quilt in America.”

If you ask Martin what attracted him to the NMSU presidency, he is ready with a six-part answer, starting with the importance of land-grant universities and ending with his respect and appreciation for the Board of Regents.

New Mexico State “is in my judgment a very good university that has a genuine opportunity to get even better,” he says. “The university is in a state that is undergoing enough change in so many interesting ways that it challenges the land-grant university to get out ahead and do the right things.”

Martin, a student of the land-grant tradition, wrote an article on “The Land-Grant University in the 21st Century” for the August 2001 issue of the Journal of
Agricultural and Applied Economics.

“The basic tenet is that the tradition of a land-grant university is to be non-traditional,” he says, summarizing the article. “Everything about the creation and evolution of the land-grant university consistently runs against the conventions of the time, and as a consequence it’s ahead of the conventions of the time and leads rather than follows.”

Driven by Curiosity

By avocation, Martin calls himself “a hardware store anthropologist.” It’s an outlet for his curiosity and his interest in how people live.

“When Jan and I travel, she likes to shop and go on organized excursions,” he says. “I believe you can tell a lot about how people live by going in their hardware stores to see what they sell.”

In a way, his approach to academic administration is driven by the same tendency.

“If you want to be an academic leader, you’ve got to be curious about a lot of things,” he says. “You’ve got to find it interesting to learn something that reaches beyond your own discipline. So I tend to walk around and ask colleagues what they’re working on … My style is sort of management by sticking my nose into other people’s business.”

He is curious, too, about people who have had transformational impacts on places where they have applied their interests, and he is a keen student of academic leadership. He counts among his mentors Nils Hasselmo, a former president at the University of Minnesota who now heads the Association of American Universities; Mark Yudof, another University of Minnesota president who now is chancellor of the University of Texas System; Charles Young, a former president at Florida; and the aforementioned John Lombardi.

“Nils taught me patience, consistency and persistence in making change at a university,” he recalls. Yudof “was a lawyer and he saw the world so much differently.”

Young “is an icon among higher education leaders and just being around Chuck and soaking up his vast experience has in many ways shaped who I am.”

Lombardi is “an absolutely brilliant man, whose mind is so quick and so penetrating that I was always amazed by it,” he adds.

From these and others, he says, he has over time developed a pretty reliable sense of how to navigate the internal and external politics of a university. “And also, I do think I’ve been either lucky or good at assembling around me good people to work with. I appreciate and admire skills in others that can add to the success of an administrative team.”

Proven Fundraiser

NMSU Regents say they selected Martin because of his vision, commitment to diversity and proven skills as a fundraiser.

“Dr. Martin is a vital, energetic individual with the vision to lead NMSU to greatness,” Regent Laura Conniff, who chaired the presidential search committee, said when the choice was announced in March. “Mike and his wife, Jan, have led a life that exemplifies a commitment to diversity. His outstanding fund-raising ability and belief in the land-grant mission are two of his numerous qualifications.”

Martin arrived at the University of Florida in the middle of a big fund-raising campaign. His unit raised $63 million of the $850 million brought in during that five-year campaign, and since then has raised $12 million to $14 million a year.

In addition to his administrative responsibilities, Martin has managed to remain active as a scholar in his areas of specialization – marketing, prices, international trade, public policy, transportation and business logistics. He has written numerous book chapters and articles for academic journals, and he writes occasionally for trade publications and the popular press.

“When you’ve been an academic as long as I have, you feel guilty if you’re not writing something,” he says. “But I also think people like me ought to go on record with our colleagues so they have something to hold us to.”

Family Ties

Michael V. Martin “It's learning curve time. I think there are two things I need to become very familiar with very quickly. One is how can I best communicate to everybody my commitment to achieving diversity to all of its dimensions. The other thing is to get as up-to-speed as I can on external fund raising and the budget process at the state level.”

Martin says his wife, Jan, is extremely organized and knows the job of university president’s wife well.

“The people of Las Cruces will find her to be a very high-energy, very committed, very disciplined person who will commit 120 percent of her energy,” he says.

She taught school while her husband earned his master’s degree, then moved into 4-H youth work as a program coordinator in Wisconsin, Minnesota and Oregon. In Florida, she was active as a volunteer and fund-raiser for Hospice and Habitat for Humanity.

In addition to “a strong commitment to community activism,” she brings with her an appreciation for outdoor activities such as hiking and biking.

In both regards, she says, “I’m really looking forward to learning the new terrain, so to speak.” But her first priority will be to size up her commitments to the university.

The Martins both say their lives have been immeasurably enhanced by their two children, both adopted from Korea. Amanda, adopted at seven months old, is a graduate of the University of Wisconsin- Eau Claire, and works as a graphic artist in St. Paul, Minn. Sam, adopted at three and a half years, earned a degree in genetics from the University of Minnesota and was just accepted to graduate school at Sarah Lawrence College in New York.

“My children are two of the most interesting human beings I know,” Martin says. “They never cease to teach me something. … They are central to an awful lot of what our lives are.”