A Comprehensive History of President Murray's Leadership
When Dennis J. Murray graduated from California State University, Long Beach in the 1960s, he stood up alongside 7,000 other undergraduates, conferred his degree, and sat back down. That was the only attention paid to undergraduates at commencement, and he thought it was “ridiculous.”
“I said that if I ever had anything to do with how it was run, I would want to have a personal experience walking across the stage,” Murray said.
Today, he has a whole lot to do with how its all run. And he has for the past four decades, since he began his duty as President of Marist in 1979.
President Murray at commencement in the 1980s. Source: Marist Archives
On that day, he made a vow to himself — no matter how big the College grew, every student would have a chance to walk across the stage. Since then, he has given out a total of 36,000 diplomas to Marist students, each walking across the stage to celebrate their education.
That was one of many changes, big and small, set into the agenda at Marist in the past four decades. When he started, it was a simple, local institution led by the Marist Brothers — there were very few buildings, only about 1,000 undergraduate students, and a few thousand dollars cash on hand.
Murray was President of Marist College from 1979 to 2016. Following the resignation of former President David Yellen in Jun. 2019, President Murray has taken the role of Interim President. A long reign like his is not unheard of, but is extremely uncommon in higher education.
“I was able to serve as President at Marist College for all that time, at three different colleges without leaving Marist.”
“I was able to serve as President at Marist College for all that time, at three different colleges without leaving Marist,” he said. He sees the timeline like this: during the 1980s, Marist emerged from a small, local college to a regional college. In the 1990s, it became an East Coast college, and in the 2000s, a national and even an international university.
“Each one of those periods of the College’s history presented new challenges and new opportunities.”
From left, Floyd Patterson with President Murray and Rik Smits at commencement in 1988. Source: Marist Archives
“Eyes and Ears”
When Dennis Murray was in his early 30s, he was one of the most impressive young academics in the country.
He received his bachelor's degree in political science from California State University, Long Beach, as well as his master's degree and doctorate in public administration from USC. He also worked as the director of university relations and executive assistant to the president at California State University, Long Beach.
He called the executive assistant position his “break,” into the industry. “By working in his office for five years, I really got a great overview of what it meant to be a President, and I understood all aspects of running a large university.”
The late famous political scientist, Steve Horn, was President of California State University at Long Beach at the time. “It really was a unique set of circumstances,” Murray said. He got to sit in on cabinet meetings, see what vice presidents did and see how Horn operated.
Then, he worked as Vice President at Whittier College, after about 18 months there, he got the very email that transformed his career. “We were kind of hoping for the Whittier job,” Marilyn Murray, his wife, said. Meanwhile, she was pregnant with their first child, and her family had been in California for nearly five generations.
An executive search firm emailed him, saying that there was a college in Poughkeepsie, New York called Marist looking for a new President. They had identified some leaders of the top and up-and-coming young leaders of higher education in America — and they were hoping for Murray to send in an application.
He was flattered, but moving to New York would be difficult at the time.
“They didn’t take no for an answer, so then they contacted me and said look, just come back. We want you to see New York, to see this place,” he said.
Source: Dennis and Marilyn Murray
Despite concerns, they took the trip.
“We went back to California and he asked me what I thought,” Marilyn said. “We liked it — but we’d only take it for about three years, and then come back.”
Little did they know, three years would turn into five — and five would turn into 38.
Amid all of this — rewind four decades, and Dennis Murray was sitting in his living room reading, barely paying attention to the television. A PBS telecast was running a newsreel called “Eyes and Ears of the World,” coincidentally, it was rolling the 1932 rowing regatta on the Hudson River.
The telecaster announced, “Now, let’s go to Poughkeepsie, New York!” convincing Murray to go and check the place out.
Years later, Murray was met with the realization that Lowell Thomas, a famous broadcaster whom Marist’s School of Communications is now named after — was the voice on that very newsreel.
Murray smiled. “So it may have been fate, right?”
Dennis and Marilyn Murray on campus in the 1980s while Marilyn was pregnant with her first child, her daughter, Marian. Source: Dennis and Marilyn Murray
Marilyn Murray
Marilyn Murray sat in the downstairs conference room in the Greystone building beside a stack of old photo albums. “This is such a crazy picture, I don’t remember him ever smiling like that — it just doesn’t look like him,” she said, pointing to a black and white close-up of her husband in his early 40s.
She then pulled a scrapbook given to President Murray by the Student Government Association as a gift during his initial departure in 2016. Included were photos showing the evolution campus crafted during Dennis Murray’s tenure — from the Red Fox mascot costume to the stained-glass windows of the campus Chapel.
“He still thinks he has brown hair,” Marilyn laughed.
“She was a very big part of helping build Marist College,” Dennis Murray said. “She has really supported a lot of the women’s programs, as it was very much a boys’ school when we came here.”
Women were first admitted to the evening division classes at Marist in 1966, and were eventually admitted to the day classes in 1968. When Dennis Murray first stepped into the position in 1979, the College was still largely dominated by male students.
Dennis and Marilyn Murray at a Marist tailgate in the spring in the 1990s. Source: Marist Archives
Marilyn devoted much of her work to empower the small fraction of female attendees, from hosting an annual Senior Tea at their home for the female graduates to working closely with the fashion department.
And they’re used to working as a team.
Dennis Murray was the student body president at his undergraduate college, which had 29,000 students. “This was in the 1960s, when there were a lot of war protests, racial unrest and it was a difficult time to be a student body president,” Marilyn said.
Besides the sociocultural context, the California state college system was turning its 21 institutions into universities at the time — Dennis Murray worked directly with state officials during the transformation. “We met a lot of elected officials — so even before we got married, we were very active in the community,” she said.
Marilyn worked in public administration for the city of Long Beach, running programs with high school students in the region, during the time period when Dennis Murray was offered the Marist position. “I offered a different perspective of what Dennis was doing, just on the other side — and we have done that the whole time,” Marilyn said. “Coming here, we just continued what we had done before.”
Dennis Murray in the Rotunda. Source: Marist Archives
Community That Flows Through Campus
Marist had a $500,000 endowment when it pursued Murray in the late 1970s.
“When I came in, there were some financial challenges — the college was stable, but the endowment was just a few hundred thousand dollars,” Murray said. “They were going year to year in terms of cash flow, and unfortunately, even though we drew a pretty good group of students from New York area primarily — it didn’t have reputation.”
But Murray was sold. He saw both challenge and opportunity in a small liberal arts college on the Hudson River, and he was only 32 years old.
“It used to drive me crazy when I would go down to New York City and tell people I’m the President of Marist College, and they didn’t know anything about it,” he said. He recalled a time where he was even asked if the college was named after Roger Maris, a famous Yankee player who had the homerun record at the time.
According to the Poughkeepsie Journal, Marist increased its total assets from $22 million to $687 million. The number of full-time and part-time employees grew from 350 to 1,324, while enrollment has grown from 1,842 to 6,365.
Today, the endowment has grown from $500,000 to $230 million.
According to Murray, lasting partnerships with the Hudson Valley community have made up a great piece of Marist’s growth. “When people came to me with ideas for partnerships, I’d ask ‘What’s in it for the Marist students?’ You can be a partner, but there has to be something in it for our students,” he said.
“Lee Miringoff and Barbara Carvalho really have jointly built the Marist Poll into the nationally and internationally recognized polling organization that it is today,” Murray said. “I am particularly proud of the way we do it here because we focus on the students.”
Murray also piloted the IBM-joint study in Poughkeepsie, alongside a lasting relationship with the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum in Hyde Park, where he has been a trustee for over 25 years.
The partnership with the Marist Italy campus in Florence, Lorenzo de Medici Institute, has fostered a global collegiate experience for undergraduates.
Every year, Murray would travel to Florence to host a dinner with the Freshman Florence Experience (FFE) students, assuring he’d meet every member of the group face-to-face so they knew the College would be here to support them when they transferred back.
“A cool thing that people don’t talk about a lot is that near our Florence campus there is on a great river — the Arno, and our campus here is on the Hudson,” he said. “It’s just a coincidence that it is running right through our campus.”
However, it’s not a coincidence that both campuses foster similar community values — and Marist’s relationship with the city of Florence is only one example.
John O’Shea, a 25-year member of the Board of Trustees and O’Shea Hall honoree, “My presence on the board here was a very exciting time — and it still continues to be that way,” he said.
O’Shea first stepped onto campus as a young boy, helping his father, an electrical contractor, wire the Marist Brothers’ original campus buildings. “It was only about 25 acres or so — a lot of open land,” O’Shea said.
Today, O’Shea Hall, the third residence hall in the North Campus Housing Complex, is named after he and his wife, Nancy.
“Dennis Murray interacts a lot with the students, much more than many colleges do, and he enjoys interacting with the people here on campus — and I think word spreads on that,” O’Shea said.
President Murray presented rare photos of the Dalai Lama as a young man in Tibet from the Lowell Thomas Papers, housed at Marist. Dr. Murray presented the photos as a gift to the Dalai Lama at his birthday party in Washington D.C. in 1995. Source: Marist Archives
Dennis and Marilyn Murray and Bro. Paul Ambrose Fontaine, FMS, presented Pope John Paul II with a gift in 1997. Source: Marist Archives
A Strong Foundation
Dennis Murray sold newspapers on the street corners of Los Angeles as a young boy. “I had a lot of odd-jobs,” he said, having worked in the Sears hardware department and climbing electrical power lines through his college years. “I was always able to relate to people who do that kind of work.”
“We were a lower-middle income family, didn’t have a lot — a small, two-bedroom house with three kids,” said Murray, a grandson of Irish-Catholic immigrants.
The key to his success in academia did not transpire through past generations of collegiate training, but instead, through the deep intellect of his father, a member of the International Brotherhood of Electrical Workers (IBEW) union in L.A. “My father was very well-read, very well-educated person, but didn’t have a college degree,” Murray said.
“People meet me on the East Coast and think, I’ve been President at Marist going on 38 years — ‘he must have gone to Harvard, born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ — well, I wasn’t. But I think those diverse experiences have helped me to be a more effective leader, and is probably one of the reasons why I was able to stay in a position like this for so long.”
“The neighborhood I grew up in was a pretty tough neighborhood,” he said. “I do feel that even growing up in a tough neighborhood can pose challenges when you’re young, I think diversity has helped me through my career.”
“People meet me on the East Coast and think, I’ve been President at Marist going on 38 years — ‘he must have gone to Harvard, born with a silver spoon in his mouth,’ — well, I wasn’t,” Murray said. “But I think those diverse experiences have helped me to be a more effective leader, and is probably one of the reasons why I was able to stay in a position like this for so long.”
Murray’s appreciation for the combination of service and intellect helped to craft the legacy he created at Marist.
Source: Marist Archives
His father’s allegiance to his community helped to carry Dennis Murray to what he claims to be one of the most transformational moments of his life. His district’s assemblyman in California, a friend of his father’s, came to his childhood home with the news that they were going to lead the effort to elect the first Irish-Catholic President of the United States, John F. Kennedy.
“Because of that we got invited to the L.A. Democratic Convention of 1960 at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, it was his New Frontier Speech,” Murray said.
At that point in time, he’d seen a vital history unfold as a boy, and he’d continue to write the history of the Hudson Valley for years to come.
“That changed my life — just asking myself, why are all these people so excited about this young guy? What is leadership and why are they turning to him as a leader?” he said. “From that day on, I knew I was a different person. I knew I had different goals and aspirations.”