fulton montgomery community college.docVIP

FULTON MONTGOMERY COMMUNITY COLLEGE INTERVIEW: Dr. Hadley DePuy, President INTERVIEWED BY: Dr. Cornelius Robbins April 13, 2007 NR: I am interviewing Dr. Hadley DePuy, who was president of Fulton Montgomery Community College in the 1970s, and we’re hoping that he will tell us how things were going while he was at Fulton Montgomery Community College. Thanks very much for giving us this interview, Stretch. HD: It’s a pleasure, Neal. I came on board Fulton Montgomery as the second president. The first president, Dr. William Gragg, had left the campus in the summer of 1971 and he was succeeded by John Deisseroth, who was the former Superintendent of Schools in the Canajoharie area. For a year, he was acting president. I came on board July 1, 1972 and stayed through the end of 1977. When I arrived at the college, I was not only the second president, but I was probably more of a neophyte in public education than anybody else then serving as president. My background, as a teacher and dean, had been in private institutions; Franklin and Marshall College, Hamilton College, Colgate University and Cornell University. And when I came to Fulton Montgomery, I was dean at Hamilton College. I give you this background because, in many ways, I was the wrong candidate, and in some ways, I was the right candidate to come on board, because the founding president, Bill Gragg, a delightful guy, left very quickly, so there was no time for a presidential search over a longer period of time. John Disseroth, the interim president and I were both alumni of Colgate. John had heard about my work at Hamilton. The search committee called me one day, and I was thinking seriously about going to Southern Methodist University. I always had an interest in the public community college as one of the best innovations to hit higher education in generations. So I immediately became interested in that opportunity, and with a declining enrollment, a very tight financial battle, and of course,