Lynette Marshall, President of the University of Iowa Foundation
"This is a moment of substantial transition." - Lynette Marshall
Lynette Marshall greets office guests as if she is still the National Pork Queen, a title she won in 1981. She smiles a beauty queen’s smile, one that wrinkles the edges of her eyes and shows a set of straight, pearly white teeth.
Her make-up is perfectly applied, her ears and neck accented with a simple gold jewelry. A short but stylish crop of silver hair crowns the head where the tiara once sat.
At 48, she still looks glamorous. It’s hard to tell she grew up on a blue-collar livestock and grain farm in Illinois, babysitting neighbor kids and detassling 6-foot-tall cornstalks. Instead of Pork Queen sashes and crowns, Marshall now wears modest blouses or suits and black-rimmed glasses. She’s at what she hopes will be her last stop in her professional life, serving as president of The University of Iowa Foundation since 2006, so she can retire with her husband, near-grown children and growing book list.
Blue-collar beginnings Marshall’s roots are in Speer, Ill., just outside Peoria, where she was born and raised on a fifth-generation farm. She was the only biological child of her parents, Rodger and Janet, and had three adopted siblings. The other kids enjoyed “slopping the hogs” on the family farm, Marshall said, but she was not so enthusiastic.
“I wasn’t active in the livestock part of the operation,” she said. “I always say happily my father was a male chauvinist and I enjoyed staying inside to cook and sew. Hog chores were not my idea of fun.”
Marshall describes her upbringing as “very rural.” The family farm was 12 miles from school and her high school graduating class had fewer than 20 students. Her closest group of friends consisted of other farm and 4-H children. She is proud of how the Midwest has shaped her.
“If you ask about fundamental identity questions, I think it really defines much of my grounding,” Marshall said. Over time, she’s also acquired more cosmopolitan tastes: “I love to travel, I love urban areas, I love getting out and doing things.”
As a top-tier executive, she still values lasting relationships with her family and siblings; vacations with her husband, Jeff, and her two children Michael and Katherine; and her ever-growing passion for books. A self-proclaimed “literature geek,” Marshall keeps an active profile on the popular book site GoodReads.com, sharing online reviews with friends and colleagues.
Marshall shapes her public figure As she continued her 4-H interests throughout middle and high school she began to take interests and opportunities at her door, some which she said have shaped her for the role she performs today. At the beginning of her junior year of high school, Marshall and three 4-H friends went to a small, 5-watt radio station to tape a public service announcement. She doesn’t remember what it was for now 32 years later, but remembers the station manager offering her a job. She took it.
Her shifts were about seven hours long, and as she describes it, “a one-man operation.” She ran mixing boards, changed tapes or records and spoke between songs.
“It was a consistent fit with my public speaking and training with the spoken word,” Marshall recalled. She continued to come back every summer and during college at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, she would work during winter breaks, too.
Her radio station experiences made her curious about agricultural radio reporting, but she also was interested in medicine. She struggled over choices. Her agricultural economics classes interested her, and she decided her dream job was with the United States Department of Agriculture or the World Food Organization.
After graduation from Illinois with a degree in agricultural sciences in 1983, Marshall spent six months in Germany, where she became infatuated with the culture and language. She soon caught word that she had gotten a job she’d interviewed and applied for just before her departure overseas: as the first fundraiser for the University of Illinois College of Agriculture. Over the next 18 years, she worked to develop an umbrella program incorporating alumni relations, special events and fundraising activities under one comprehensive College of Agriculture office.
Her responsibilities at Iowa now are not much different, Marshall said, except she now reports to a 30-member board instead of one dean like at Illinois. During her time in Illinois, she helped host an open house of 12,000 guests and threw a post-graduation picnic for the 800 graduates and their families.
Though she’s no longer organizing picnics, the central goals of her job have not changed. “Now, like then, I think it’s a real priority to maintain relationships with our academic partners,” Marshall said. “I [would] really try to be deliberate about trying to stay in touch with department heads, individual faculty members and program leaders.”
Success in the boys’ club Her fundraising work paid off in her career advancement as well. In the 1990s she went back to school for a master’s degree in educational policy studies and received her Certified Fundraising Executive designation in 1992. By 2004, she was the University of Illinois associate chancellor and shortly after the vice president of the University of Illinois Foundation, where she first encountered difficulties of being a female in a man’s business, she said.
Many women have likely encountered the same situations. Women are still grossly under represented in fund-raising or top-tier money management. According to a 2006 U.S. Census Bureau report, chief executive titles, like Marshall’s, belonged to only 23 percent of women. Management as a whole is even more staggering: 36 percent women of over 45,000 surveyed positions. In Iowa, the percentage of women in public administration is relatively higher--46 percent--but still not an equal playing field.
“It felt like in some ways it [my experience] was paternalistic and not prejudice. I had some very negative experiences working in central administration,” Marshall remembered, declining to elaborate. “And having left the University of Illinois, I would say central administration there discriminates against women in pretty powerful ways.”
In 2006, she decided it was time for a change and was hired as the third president of The University of Iowa Foundation, a job she knew she could handle given her fundraising experience, and with perks of a location close to her roots, her parents in Illinois and an institution she was eager to experience. Marshall said last summer was a “highlight in her career,” as The University of Iowa had not only a female president but a female interim provost and a female mayor in Iowa City and she is the first female CEO of The University of Iowa Foundation.
“When I looked at the Web site for Iowa when I was looking at the institution I thought ‘My gosh, there’s even women deans here,’ ” she said.
Marshall’s position as a female CEO of the foundation is new for The University of Iowa and the Big Ten. The only other school in the conference with a woman in Marshall’s position is Northwestern University’s Sarah Foder. In fact, Foder’s staff includes two female associate directors and one male development researcher.
“This is a moment of substantial transition,” Marshall said, noting how many new generations of CEOs have taken over for older, retired white males. “Now, they all are still male but it does feel like there’s a generational shift happening. The 70-year-old guys are retiring, and some of us that are mid-to-late 40s and 50s are replacing them. But, as I said, so far all but two are men [in the Big Ten]. It is nice to see opportunities for leadership coming to the next generation, male or female.”
Marshall’s management team of administrative, financial and legal professionals--or “M-Group”--is mostly female, too. At a meeting in late February, the team gathered around the small conference table in Marshall’s spacious office, tucked in the walls next to several other foundation offices on the third floor of the Levitt Center. The M-Group brings in cups coffee or bottled water, laptops and folders and follow their meeting minutes to a T, discussing changes in privacy issues with donors or upcoming fundraising events across the country. Only one male, Flynn Andrizzi, sat at the conference table.
“Women in male-dominated careers, eh,” Andrizzi jokingly asked Marshall, referring to the writer's presence. “Does this look like a male-dominated career?”
Women write the checks To attract attention to women in philanthropy, Marshall and her staff of over 200 have been working to establish outreach events for high-level women donors.
“In my own sort-of broader perspective, I think philanthropy can be a really positive career experience for women,” she said. “I hope that I’m a mentor for all of our staff but through my career I’ve been especially trying to be a mentor for young women.”
Marshall and members of her staff speak to college-level classes from speech pathology to journalism to discuss the importance of fundraising efforts, profit and non-profit organizations, hoping to interest future student leaders and philanthropists who will donate and give time to their alma maters.
“Engaging students in the life of the foundation is really a priority for me, and the student leaders are a way we can do that,” Marshall said.
Gender differences in donating Marshall also notices an imbalance on the donor level, and hopes to see dialogue open in regards to tier-structure donating, or levels donors are given within brackets of donation. At a women’s philanthropy conference two years ago, Marshall overheard a discussion between participants about the male-dominated levels of donating and associating donors with a “status”--such as a $500 level followed by a $1,000 level--with incentives for someone to donate more.
“The notion that those women were discussing, which I found very interesting, was that in their minds, women don’t necessarily respond to those incentives in the same way,” Marshall said. “There haven’t been models that have been built over time by women, so I grew up thinking that [donating tiers] was a good idea. I’m sure at some level that is successful. The notion was that women would like to get together with other women to achieve something. So let’s get a bunch of women together and build this boathouse, or let’s get these women together and achieve whatever it is we’re working toward.”
Though Marshall admits she probably won’t change the structure of the 53-year-old foundation’s donation-level system, she remains optimistic that bringing more women into philanthropy can help achieve more goals and building opportunities for institutions.
Marshall said the hard work of her predecessors has already changed the track of history that once kept men in the top-tier of donors. Ten of the 30 active foundation members are high-level women donors and two women serve on the 12-person executive committee. In March 2009, Marshall and her staff gathered applications from student leaders interested in possible careers in philanthropy.
Troubled economic waters Despite the good fortunes of reaching out to student and female philanthropists, Marshall and her team face extreme challenges with the recession and budget cuts being made in and outside the university. Currently the foundation is looking at a budget shortfall of $2.75 million, Marshall said. The endowment of The University of Iowa has dropped, like other institutions across the country, and the 2008 floods have brought enormous obstacles in fundraising in a difficult economy. An estimated $750 million is needed to help rebuild structures damaged on the UI campus.
Fortunately the donors have not stopped giving. At the New Years Eve Outback Bowl reception, a married and retired couple, both physicians, donated $5 million to the Carver College of Medicine, signing an agreement that had been in the works for years. Taiwan recently donated $2,500 to The University of Iowa, a first time for the small country. Panama also donated $2,000 in the fall to aid in flood recovery. Marshall said the relationship she builds with donors is the best part about her job, especially when she can see the money go toward good use like a new facility, faculty endowment or to help a student stay in Iowa and in school.
“This is a very intense relationship that we have with people that are so generous with the university and in many ways the development staff is the front line relationship maintenance folks,” Marshall said. “The rewards are always seeing donors money put to work for good purposes.”
The long road ahead Now, the road can only get broader, Marshall said. She would like to remain at The University of Iowa until her retirement. Both of her children--Michael, a junior in Urbandale; and Katharine, a junior at City High in Iowa City--enjoy the Midwest life.
In her spare time, she dedicates herself to the Iowa City Rotary and her local church. She and her children have participated as exchange students in their academic life, and Marshall likes to “pay it forward” by bringing exchange students into their home as well.
More importantly, Marshall said, she would like the opportunity to diversify the foundation’s representation. But she has many more hopes.
“I’m hopeful that over time we can enhance the culture of philanthropy at The University of Iowa through the activities we’re doing with and for students. And fundamentally I would anticipate that there’s one more big campaign that I would hope to do that would be successful,” she said. “I certainly hope that we are able to not only hire outstanding young men but outstanding young women, and people of color.”
Her most vital engagement, however, is with rebuilding and reuniting the campus community, particularly in the arts district where campus staples like Hancher Auditorium and The University of Iowa Museum of Art were destroyed by the raging Iowa River during the June 2008 flood.
“I’m really eager to get out there and start raising money, start the recovery, and do what we can,” Marshall said. “We’re a small, small portion of what’s going to need to happen to revitalize the campus but we’re going to do what we can. We want to contribute. We want to make a difference.”