Focus EMU Online, Weekly Issue

Martin's path to EMU presidency started in one-room schoolhouse

Editor's Note: Susan Martin will start as Eastern Michigan University's 22nd president — and its first-ever female president — July 7. The following story was reprinted from the spring 2008 issue of Exemplar magazine.

Back in the late 1950s, a young girl named Susan Work attended classes at a one-room schoolhouse in Croswell, a tiny farming community in Michigan's thumb. It was typical of the schoolhouses that, by then, were beginning to vanish in the wake of organized school districts and new, low-slung school buildings. It was small enough for the kids to throw a ball over, a time-honored schoolhouse game. It had two outhouses — one for boys, one for girls — no running water and just one teacher.

EMU'S NEXT PRESIDENT: Susan Martin,
provost and vice chancellor of academic
affairs at the University of Michigan-
Dearborn, officially becomes Eastern
Michigan University's president July 7. She
will become EMU's first female president in
its 159-year history.

One of about 35 children in grades K-8, Work was a good student because she was smart, but also because of that one, no-nonsense, demanding teacher. Mrs. Murray was her name. She had high standards, teaching much more than just the three Rs, recalls Susan Work Martin today.

"We did plays, monologues, drama — you name it. She was unbelievable," Martin recalled.

That teacher just happened to be a graduate of Michigan State Normal School in Ypsilanti, Michigan; she attended many classes in Welch Hall.

More than four decades later, that school is now Eastern Michigan University. And little Susan Work is now Dr. Susan Martin. She is going to be in Welch Hall, too — as EMU's first female president.

It all became official May 14, when the EMU Board of Regents unanimously selected Martin, 57, as EMU's 22nd president. Her schoolhouse-to-university presidential journey, on the face of it, is inspirational enough. It also places her in what must be a very small, if not solitary, category of sitting university presidents who attended one-room schoolhouses (her ability to drive a tractor by age 10, in order to get to softball practice, perhaps qualifies her in a similarly unique category).