Suzanne Denise McCray

Since Suzanne McCray took over enrollment and admissions at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, the school has seen record growth.A longtime educator, she also has overseen dozens of award-win

— It seems as though the University of Arkansas owes Suzanne Mc-Cray a lot.

McCray is the UA’s vice provost for enrollment management and its dean of admissions, where she oversees the offices of admissions, financial aid and the registrar. She has also overseen record growth at the university; this past fall, 23,199 students were enrolled at the UA, including a freshman class of 4,447. Both figures are records, for the second consecutive year in both categories.

“She does so much so efficiently, I think she may actually be four or five people masquerading as one,” says English professor Bill Quinn of Fayetteville.

The enrollment figures are the big numbers. The smaller ones are even more impressive.

At the UA, McCray has advised a Rhodes scholar, two Gates Cambridge scholars, three Marshall scholars, five Udall scholars, nine Truman scholars and 45 Goldwater scholars.

The competition for these prestigious scholarships is fierce, so having an expert like McCray on an applicant’s side is immensely valuable. She has worked with the UA’s Office of Nationally Competitive Awards since 1998 and is the author of three books about nationally competitive scholarships and awards, all published since 2005. She has been involved with the National Association of Fellowship Advisors since its founding, serving as its president from 2003-05.

“I truly cannot imagine the University of Arkansas without her,” says Judy Schwab of Fayetteville, associate vice chancellor for administration. “[Her work] has made our students nationally competitive — really, internationally competitive — and of course ultimately when students have won the fellowships, it has enhanced our academic reputation.”

McCray doesn’t believe the UA owes her a thing; she argues it’s the other way around.

She’s the one who feels an unending debt to the university. She arrived in Fayetteville in 1974, an incoming freshman from Fort Smith who could attend the university only because of a scholarship and a grant.

She had little idea of the future.

“The University of Arkansas was incredibly good to me,” she says. “I had a very limited world that I lived in and it opened a lot of doors. I’m a true believer in what we’re doing here, and I want to expand the number of people who come across our doors and have that experience.”

The way McCray feels about the UA goes well beyond the typical alumna who feels warmly about her alma mater. McCray believes most of the good things in her life are connected to her involvement with the university.

Without the UA, McCray would likely have never met her future husband, Bob Cochran, in 1979, when they were both in the school’s English department. They have three grown children together — McCray considers herself a mother of five, as she is extremely close with her two stepchildren — as well as two young grandchildren.

Those children have gone on to pursue a wide range of interests, from studying sharks in Saudi Arabia to playing college basketball at the University of West Georgia, and McCray wonders whether they would have had the freedom to chase their dreams had they been raised in a different environment. Meanwhile, she has traveled all over the country and the world, even spending a stint as co-director of a library in Romania in the mid-1980s.

“[Ever since we met], she’s been the most centered person I know, like she was born knowing who she was,” says Cochran, an English professor. “She knew that she wanted to somehow forge a life for herself that was connected with education — and specifically higher education — and she wanted to raise a family, on campus. That’s exactly what she’s done.”

McCray’s fierce loyalty to the university is why continuing to shape its enrollment is so important to her. She wants to increase the number of baccalaureate degrees in the state, and for the university to get the kind of national recognition she believes it deserves.

What she does is more than a job; it’s a mission. The university gave her a better life, and she wants others to benefit as greatly as she did.

“We have an obligation to provide students with the same kinds of opportunities they can get anywhere,” she says. “‘You’re in this state. Lucky you! You can study abroad, you can have access to research and the top faculty in the country.’”

INSPIRED EARLY

McCray would love to have a better grasp of French.

She has studied it, even got her second master’s degree in French from the UA in 1990 — earning it the same year she completed her doctorate in English from the University of Tennessee — but she still struggles with the language. McCray can read French just fine, but is hesitant to speak the language, and says that if she were to get dropped into the center of Paris, she’d need some time to prepare or else she’d be in trouble.

“I have a tin ear,” she says. “I really enjoyed the classes I took in the French department. I got used to hearing and taking notes, but I was not a frequent discusser in class. ... I think unless you speak the language of a culture, you’re always just a tourist.”

In an ideal world, one in which she had more time, McCray would achieve fluency in several languages. But even if she were to stop working immediately and immerse herself in a new language, it’s doubtful she could even begin to approach her mastery of English.

McCray’s love of English is a lifelong affair, one that began with an aunt (Katie Dyer) who taught advanced placement English in Lincoln, as well as a spirited mother who reveled in the humanities. The late Mattie McCray taught drama, speech and English at Kimmons Junior High and Northside High School, and was named Fort Smith’s Outstanding Educator in 1982.

Her mother coached the debate team, and threw herself into plays put on by her schools, handling everything from directing to selling tickets. After she passed away in 2007, numerous former students contacted Suzanne McCray and told her how much her mother had meant to them.

“My mom never spoke down to anyone,” says Suzanne’s sister, Adrianne Mc-Cray of Fort Smith. “She had a way of speaking with people that would make them feel that even if they didn’t have the knowledge she did, it was always even.”

Mattie McCray expected much of her students, that they work their hardest and get the highest grade possible. To that end, she routinely stayed after school to help students.

This was what Suzanne McCray strove to be when she began her teaching career. She graduated with high honors from the UA in 1978 with a bachelor’s degree in English, and while she studied for her master’s in English, she took a teaching assistant position in the English department.

More than 30 years later, McCray is still teaching there, even though her job does not require her to do so. Each fall, she is part of a three-instructor team that teaches a course to more than 100 honors freshmen called Honors Humanities Project — H2P for short. It’s a four-semester sequence course, combining world literature, civilization, art and architecture. (This current semester, McCray is teaching an additional class titled Strategic Enrollment Management in the College of Education and Health Professions, which has six graduate students in it.)

Her continuing to teach “tells me that she’s dedicated to students, that she loves to interact with them, and that she’s generous with her time for her colleagues,” says one of her co-teachers this past fall, Bill Levine of Fayetteville, a professor of classical studies in the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. “She doesn’t have to do this; she’s doing it for the love of the discipline and the state and the students.”

McCray has always gravitated toward the university’s best and brightest students. From 1990-2002 she worked with the Honors Studies Program at the Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences. Then the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation donated $300 million to the university in 2002, launching the school’s Honors College.

McCray was tapped to be its associate dean, helping develop the Honors College on the fly. It was there that she developed many of the recruitment strategies she has taken to her current position.

Yet all through her time with the Honors College, she continued to teach.

“I think from a recruitment point of view, it’s always been good for me to be in that class with high-ability students,” she says. “It’s great to be able to look at students I have in my class and push them to apply for certain kinds of things. I just love it.”

ALL THE DETAILS

McCray sold Megan Ceronsky on the UA, and then made sure she had made the right decision.

Ceronsky, a Minnesota native, was recruited by Mc-Cray. They first met when Ceronsky interviewed for a Sturgis Fellowship, which is offered through the Fulbright College Honors Program.

Looking back, Ceronsky admits it was a little odd for somebody from Minnesota to come to Arkansas for school, but she says McCray painted the picture of a school that could allow her a world of opportunities.

Ceronsky graduated from the UA in 2000 with a bachelor’s degree in international relations, a major that did not exist when she enrolled.

“She encouraged me to talk to folks in the political science department about creating it,” says Ceronsky, who today is a lawyer with the Environmental Defense Fund in Boulder, Colo. “She’s such a wonderful, warm, caring person. She’s always very focused on helping students [go on a path] that makes sense for them. She helps them when they need a push, but she really listens to what makes them happy.”

McCray helped Ceronsky successfully apply for a Harry S. Truman Scholarship as a junior, and then a year later guided her through the process that saw her win a Marshall Scholarship — and with it, three years of study at England’s famed Oxford University. Just six UA graduates have been awarded Marshall Scholarships since they began in 1954, and McCray has advised half of them.

Earning a Marshall Scholarship required Ceronsky to draft a personal statement, which McCray critiqued and strengthened, making sure Ceronsky effectively communicated who she was and what she cared about. She arranged practice interviews for Ceronsky, and wrote one of her letters of recommendation.

“She was completely instrumental in my success in those competitions,” Ceronsky says. “[These interviews] are very intimidating for a college student. A lot of the work Suzanne does with scholarship applicants is getting them ready for anything under the sun.”

AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITIES

McCray still advises students on the available opportunities, but in her current position her work affects just about every student who enrolls at the UA. When she made the move in 2009, her immediate task was to increase the freshman population.

This has been achieved in large part, she says, because the university has changed the way it reaches out to prospective students. Rather than using a one-approach-fits-all strategy, it has segmented populations and tailored messages to those groups.

McCray wants to expand these efforts, but at the same time, she wants to improve freshman retention. The UA has the highest retention rate of public colleges in the state, and it’s comparable to other Southeastern Conference Schools, but it must do better if it’s going to improve in the annual U.S. News and World Report rankings.

“She’s very modest about her accomplishments; she doesn’t wear them on her sleeves,” Levine says. “She is a natural nurturer of the highlevel talent pool of Arkansas students.”

Nearly four decades after she arrived on campus, more than 20 years since she went into administration, McCray has no interest in slowing down or going elsewhere.

If she has one complaint about Fayetteville, it’s that her children have all scattered to pursue their interests, leaving a once bustling home quiet most nights. She and Cochran travel frequently to see them, and when they are at home, they take in countless movies and basketball games.

And really, the fact that McCray’s children live elsewhere is not a cause for complaint. It’s a natural outgrowth of the opportunities that were presented them, opportunities she doubts would have existed without her connection to the University of Arkansas.

Wherever they are, Mc-Cray knows her kids are loyal to their family — just as the students she guides remain loyal to their university, no matter where they go. That’s why she works so hard on their behalf.

“She’s extremely grateful to the University of Arkansas, which is why she’s completely committed to what she does,” Cochran says. “She’s an incredibly hard worker. If you’re going to outwork her, you’re going to have to beat the chickens up and the owls to bed.”

SELF PORTRAIT

Suzanne McCray

DATE AND PLACE OF BIRTH Nov. 15, 1956, in Oklahoma City.

THE LAST REALLY GOOD MOVIE I SAW WAS The Artist.

MY FAVORITE AUTHORS ARE Southern women writers. Doris Betts has become my favorite. Lee Smith I like as well, and Ellen Douglas is great.

MY FAVORITE PRO SPORTS TEAM IS The Oklahoma City Thunder.

I GET UP Early — for me, that’s 6:30 — but I don’t get in gear early. I need a strong cup of tea or two and then I feel human. I used to be a huge coffee drinker, two pots a day, and I had to quit. I burned my esophagus.

I WANT TO GO TO Maharashtra in India and see the Ajanta Caves. That’s at the top of my bucket list.

ON TV I LIKE TO WATCH ESPN. I’m not sure our television has another channel.

A WORD TO SUM ME UP Grateful.

High Profile, Pages 35 on 02/19/2012

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