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Department of International Trade & Marketing Educating Global Leaders |
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Department of International Trade & Marketing Educating Global Leaders |
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Stylish, and So Cool You May Need a Parka
By ROBIN FINN. The New York Times. October 16, 2002
Dr. JOYCE F. BROWN has her vermilion manicure wrapped around the remote control that operates the gale-force air-conditioning system that keeps her office at SUNY's Fashion Institute of Technology, where she became president in 1998, more than fashionably cool. Cold.
Not that the ancillary chill is needed by the petite Ms. Brown, who is not a k a Mrs. H. Carl McCall despite being very married since 1983 to New York State's current comptroller and Democratic candidate for governor. She is already the consummate cool customer in her brown Ungaro suit and baroque pearls, subtle complements to skin that resembles, appropriately, coffee ice cream in tone and temperature. The institute's first female, and first black, president emits authority and glamour in waves, like a strobe.
"I am not a fashionista," says this veteran of 30 years in public education administration, most of it at CUNY, plus a short stint as deputy mayor during the Dinkins administration. "What I know how to do is run a college, and this just happens to be a fashion college. My clothes, well, it's all part of the presentation. Now when my husband asks me where I've been when I've gone shopping, I can get away with calling it research."
He hardly interferes in her shopping habits: with a salary of more than $151,000, plus $100,000 or so from various boards she's on (like Polo Ralph Lauren and U.S. Enrichment Corporation, a plutonium supplier), she can afford her own Ungaros.
She offers, in a hostess's voice that is polite but slightly hoarse (must be all that autumnal campaigning on hubby's behalf), to mellow out the office polar conditions, but admits she favors an icy domain. Since it clearly agrees with her — a more fetchingly natural 56-year-old female executive would be hard to conjure in this city of relentless cosmetic enhancement — she is encouraged to keep the air the way she likes it. Besides, the photographer is already too smitten by her smile to complain about catching a cold, or about her disinclination to pose at her desk, which she condemns as too disorganized. Something she vehemently is not.
Ms. Brown continues smiling, tapping her nails on the conference tabletop as if typing out her thoughts, even when addressing touchy topics (she has a Ph.D. in clinical psychology and evidently knows the secret to putting up a pleasant front during interrogation).
First, there's her age: she may be 56 but she feels completely unconnected to that lofty numeral. She has, she jokes, been subject to bouts of chronological age rage since turning 25. Next, and more seriously, there's her husband's recent difficulty involving 61 letters of support for job-hunting family and friends that he, unwisely although not illegally, sent out on state stationery. His gesture earned him censure in the media. Whether it cost him voter points is undetermined, but Ms. Brown, hard-pressed to find the sin in his desire to help the career trajectories of those he cares about (including her), insists that it won't.
Regarding her job, which fulfilled a career imperative, she says her husband didn't help her land it: "My husband did not get me this job, and if he did know how to do that he should bottle it, because it's not an easy process." Truth is, she was approved by a board controlled by Gov. George E. Pataki. If, as rumor has it, the job was an olive branch extended to dissuade Mr. McCall from running for governor, well, it didn't work.
BUT there is no denying that her husband wrote those 61 letters, is there?
"Carl likes to be helpful," she says, gazing out the window. "I don't believe you'll ever find anyone who would say he tried to pressure them to do anything. I don't even want to belabor it. I certainly knew we'd be under the microscope. What I do I consider to be in the public domain as well, so there's really no point in taking all this personally," Ms. Brown adds, referring to the flap last spring over $529,000 the institute spent refurbishing the penthouse apartment where she lives and entertains potential donors to the school's $60 million capital improvement plan.
"It was gratuitous and unnecessary and it went away," she says of the controversy. She stands by the renovations, too: she approved every swatch, sees it as an investment for the college, not a castle for her and Mr. McCall (they also have a weekend place in Dutchess County). "Anyone contemplating donating to the college would have thought we didn't present ourselves as arbiters of the very things we teach around here had they seen the apartment before the work was done." So far, the fashion institute has raised $16 million from private donors, $4 million above the original target.
She is not done, either. Even if her husband wins, she won't desert Seventh Avenue for Albany. "Remember, I'm not the one who's running."
Ms. Brown grew up in Harlem: Convent Avenue at 141st Street. Her mother worked for the city's Housing Authority; her father was a postal clerk. Neither went to college, but a degree for her was nonnegotiable. "I like to say they did such a good job instilling the college mantra that I went forever," she says.
After Marymount, she attended graduate school at New York University and worked at CUNY. Instead of having children — though she gained a stepdaughter when she married — she had jobs: "It was just how my life evolved; I made certain choices, took certain chances. Now I tend to say I have 12,000 children." By 1990, she was acting president of Baruch College, a temporary post. She wanted to prove she could run a college and suspects that she did.
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