ASU a ‘calling’ for President Marion Fedrick

ALBANY — Doubters might scoff at the thought that 12-year-old Sarah Fedrick has one-on-one conversations with God from time to time. These are, after all, cynical times.

But cynics won’t convince Sarah’s mom, Albany State University President Marion Fedrick, that her daughter hasn’t been blessed with some kind of prescience. After all, Marion Fedrick’s got first-hand experience.

“When I was serving as interim president early during my tenure at Albany State, I went into Sarah’s room and she had a box that sat underneath a sign she’d made that said, ‘Going to Albany,’” Fedrick said, smiling broadly at the memory. “These were some of her favorite things and I asked her why she was setting aside things for the (usually weekend) visits she and her dad would make to Albany while I was there. She said, ‘No, mama, we’re moving to Albany.’

“I couldn’t convince her otherwise.”

Sarah Fedrick had surprised her mom a few weeks previously when, while sitting in the back seat of the family car and apparently paying no attention to her mother’s phone conversation with then ASU President Art Dunning about the qualities of the next president of the university, Marion Fedrick felt her seat vibrate. She looked back at her daughter to see what was going on.

“She’s pointing her finger at me, saying, ‘You, you, he’s talking about you, mama,’” Marion Fedrick says.

And, there was that time six years earlier, only hours before Horace Fedrick, Marion and Sarah were to leave for Detroit to start a new life after Marion accepted a job at Wayne State University.

“We were picking up one of Sarah’s friends, and when Horace got out of the car, Sarah said to me so matter-of-factly, ‘We’re not moving to Detroit, mama. God wanted me to tell you,’” Marion Fedrick said, a touch of awe in her voice. “When Horace got back in the car, I told Sarah to tell him what she’d told me, and she said, ‘God didn’t tell me to tell anyone else but you.’”

The Fedricks, of course, did not move. There were family issues to attend to, so dad Horace stayed on at his position as chief investigator with the Atlanta District Attorney’s Office, while Marion remained at her post as vice chancellor with the University System of Georgia. And the stage was set for the Philadelphia-born, seventh child of 10 who’d one time dreamed of being a judge to become, of all things, a university president.

“That’s certainly not something I aspired to,” Fedrick said, laughing. “In fact, I actually had the nerve to think that my position with the University System was my ‘retirement job.’”

As the pieces gradually fell into place, clearing Fedrick’s path to the Albany State presidency, it quickly became clear that she was the right person at the right time for the job. Then executive vice chancellor (and current chancellor) Steve Wrigley, one of her most ardent supporters, publicly said as much. But the path to the ASU presidency was certainly a circuitous one.

Fedrick said having nine siblings (five male, four female) paved the way for a “wonderfully dysfunctional family life” presided over by her nurse’s assistant/homemaker mother and her Marine and Navy veteran father who at “6-foot-3 and as broad as a door” cut a dashing figure in his many jobs with the local school system.

But just as her grandparents were part of the great migration northward by blacks seeking better opportunities and escape from Jim Crow laws rampant in the South, her parents became part of the early migration back southward. The family moved to Augusta when Marion was 13, and she was enrolled at historic Laney High School.

“Now, I didn’t want to go to Laney,” Fedrick said. “I knew Lucy C. Laney was at that time the only black female who had her portrait in the Georgia Capitol, I knew of the school’s history, and I knew we had family members who went to school there. But I didn’t want to go to Laney. I was an outsider; I talked funny.”

While at Laney, Fedrick became associated with Earnestine Harris, who ran the Upward Bound program for nearby Payne College. The headstrong student had every intention of heading back to Philly (“I tell people I grew up in Philly, matured in Georgia.”) to Temple University upon graduation. And while Harris, who had a huge influence on young Marion, couldn’t convince her to attend Payne, she insisted that Fedrick apply to 10 colleges.

“I was going to Temple,” Fedrick said. “I had no interest in those applications, but I did it because Ms. Harris insisted.”

One of the schools Fedrick randomly picked was the University of Georgia. As fate — again — would have it, she not only was accepted at UGA, she was offered a tuition scholarship.

“My favorite cousin, Bobby Hill, had taken me to my first day of Pre-K, and he took me to my first day at UGA,” Fedrick said. “I was scared, and I told him ‘I don’t even know how I’ll get back to Augusta.’ He said, ‘I know how you’ll get back. I’ll come and get you Christmas.’ And I didn’t go back until Christmas.

“I knew anything but getting an education was not an option for me. That’s something our parents ingrained in us. Our dad would buy a new set of encyclopedias every two year, and anytime we were idle he’d hand us one of those books and tell us to read.”

Fedrick started working with the Housing Authority in Augusta when she was a high school sophomore, and she continued to work while attending UGA. She landed jobs with DuPont and in the HR department of the Athens-Clarke County Police Department, a job she maintained for the 10 years it took her to finish requirements for Public Administration undergraduate and graduate degrees at UGA.

It was while working with the Athens-Clarke PD that Marion met a brash young commander of the local SWAT team named Horace Fedrick.

“He was voted one of the area’s most eligible bachelors, and I kind of watched him on the sly,” Fedrick says, laughing at the memory. “He was so cocky, but I admit I was secretly infatuated.”

The couple started “courting” a short while later, and when Marion left for a job in Atlanta at Clarke Atlanta University, Horace followed a short while later. They made it through a long-distance marriage — she in Atlanta, he in Athens — for a year and a half before Horace followed his bride to Atlanta. He couldn’t work in the police department, so he took a job as an investigator with the DA’s office. A few years later, Sarah was born.

Marion Fedrick worked at Clarke Atlanta for a short period and at Emory University before moving into the corporate world with BellSouth. She said she loved the change of pace and again had a stable, exciting career that she thought would last. But 10 years later, after running a “tent city” in Slidell, La., after Hurricane Katrina, securing necessities for BellSouth technicians working in the area and for displaced area residents, she knew she was destined for a different career path.

Fedrick worked with the University System office for seven years, overseeing a $500 million budget and $3 billion in investments, and she won the admiration of Wrigley and then Chancellor Hank Huckaby. So when the need to make changes at Albany State in south Georgia arose, officials in the system office knew just the person to head the transition, from Dunning to a new president and the continued merger of ASU with Darton College.

“In my duties as vice chancellor, I worked closely with the presidents of Albany State, Kennesaw State, West Georgia, Valdosta and Columbus,” Fedrick said. “I was very familiar with the situation in Albany.

“When Steve Wrigley said that ‘sounds like you down there,’ I told them I’d be happy to be part of the transition team. I honestly figured it would take about three months. I didn’t even look for a permanent place; I stayed in a hotel. There was, of course, a little more to do than I thought.”

With Dunning heading toward retirement, Fedrick agreed to step in as interim president in January of this year as the search for a permanent president continued.

“I did go ahead and rent an apartment,” she quipped.

With controversy swirling around the university and many in the community who had ties to both ASU and Darton complaining about the merger, Wrigley and others came down and met with stakeholders. They asked the pointed question, “What do you want in your next president?”

“After Steve held those meetings, he called me in one day and said, ‘You know, Marion, what they’re all saying sounds a lot like you,’” Fedrick said. “What could I do? I took the job.”

Fedrick has guided the college through some tough sledding already. There is the ongoing concern over the merger, financial issues that had long plagued the university and a Category 2 Hurricane that forced evacuation of the campus. And there is that niggling “HBCU controversy” that has been a thorn in many Albany State supporters’ sides.

“You can’t be a ‘kind-of HBCU,’” Fedrick said. “That part of the transition, I think was handled wrong. Albany State, by its definition, is an HBCU. And there are certain expectations that come with that title. Since there is the word ‘black’ in that designation, there are concerns in some parts of the community.

“But HBCUs were created to provide educational opportunities that did not exist for certain elements of the population. And that’s the historical element I focus on. It goes back to before 1964, before there was such a designation (as HBCU), when the primary concern was serving the underserved. I look at that, and what I think of is inclusion. We’re an HBCU, we don’t exclude anyone.”

So the Fedricks are back together, reunited around mom Marion’s latest adventure. Horace has retired (“He just works out at the Y everyday, makes me so mad!”) and Sarah is embracing her new community. She’s “re-teaching” Marion piano, and the two besties debate which Marvel superhero is the best.

And the new university president goes to work every day as an answer to a call.

“Friends ask me if they pay me enough,” Fedrick says. “I told them there’ll never be enough money to pay someone adequately for all that needs to be done here. But that’s why I didn’t come for the money. I came because I truly believe Albany and Albany State are a calling for me.

“Everything I’ve done in my professional career and in my life has been leading me here. This is where I’m supposed to be.”

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