New Fort Hays State president living a dream

It was not the best path to follow to become a university president: Live in poverty in Cuba as a kid and go to bed hungry.

Grow up wearing ill-fitting shoes that eventually led to three foot surgeries, including a toe amputation.

Go to Spain with a grandmother and a sister and live in a convent.

Come to America when you don’t speak English.

Work full time as a teenager in a shop in Miami during the week and clean houses on Sundays.

But this was Mirta Martin’s early path. She was inaugurated as the new president of Fort Hays State University last week.

She is the ninth president in the school’s 112-year history, its first female president and the first Hispanic president in the Kansas Board of Regents system.

Martin has been serving as president since July, succeeding Ed Hammond, who retired. What she has found so far among students, faculty and staff members, she said, is a pioneer spirit and a work ethic similar to the one that got her where she is today.

“People look after each other and care for each other,” Martin said. “I feel like I’ve been here all my life.

“The support, the love, the caring and the embrace of the students has been second to none.”

Martin came to Hays from Virginia State University, where she was dean of the Reginald F. Lewis School of Business. She said she wants to position Fort Hays State to face challenges in higher education, such as declining state and federal funding and crippling student-loan debt.

She also wants to work with faculty, businesses and industry to anticipate changes and trends so that the university can develop curricula that prepares students for jobs that don’t yet exist.

She works long hours, from 7 a.m. to 10 p.m., although she doesn’t view what she does as work.

“What I do, I love,” Martin said. “For me, it’s not a job. I wake up every morning thinking it’s a new adventure.”

Martin was born in Havana, Cuba, into a family that was wealthy until Fidel Castro took over. Castro took everything but their education and religious faith, she said.

She remembers happy family gatherings in Cuba when she was very young. She also remembers seeing a padlock on the neighborhood beauty shop one day on her way to school and being told that the Communists had taken over the shop.

She remembers going to bed hungry. To this day, one sure way to make Martin angry is to leave food on your plate.

She remembers that her parents were allowed to buy only one pair of thin, cheap shoes a year for their children, so they bought shoes that were too big, figuring the kids’ feet would grow into them.

They stuffed paper and cardboard into the shoes to fill them out, but the stuffing kept compressing and her feet kept slipping and sliding in the shoes as she walked, so her toes constantly clawed and grasped at the soles.

Her feet were a mess, she said. Surgery was required to break her toes so they could be straightened. One toe had to come off.

She left Cuba with her grandmother and sister when she was 6, went to Spain, lived in a convent, then came to the United States. They hoped to get the rest of the family out of Cuba. Her mother and a brother made it out, but not her father.

Martin said that she and her husband, John, an engineer, tried for five or six years to get her father out, but U.S. immigration officials wouldn’t let him into the country because he was older than 65. They had to settle for a visa that allows him occasional visits to the U.S.

Her father used one of those visits to join her at Fort Hays State for Friday’s inauguration ceremony.

Martin sees him about every other year, she said. She sends him money, she said, but he still does not have enough food to eat every day.

Martin was 14 when she and her grandmother and sister moved to Miami. Martin attended school and worked a full-time job to help her grandmother, who worked two jobs. Both cleaned houses on Sundays to augment their meager income.

Her grandmother never complained, Martin said. She felt she had given Martin and her sister freedom.

And she insisted that the only way they could achieve the American dream was through education.

“Not going to college was never an option,” Martin said.

Martin did well enough in high school to be accepted at Duke University, where she earned degrees in psychology and political science. She earned a master’s degree in business administration from the University of Richmond. It took her six years, because she worked as a bank executive during that time.

There were times she wanted to stop, she said. But her grandmother kept pushing her to finish.

Martin also earned a doctorate from Virginia Commonwealth University. She speaks three languages.

Martin and her husband, who met while they were at Duke, have two children. Both of the children took the family message about education to heart. Their daughter, Katherine, is working on a doctorate at the University of Miami, and their son, Patrick, is a senior at the University of Virginia and has applied to graduate school.

Martin was a professor and administrator at several colleges in Virginia, where she and her husband lived for 32 years. With the children gone, they were looking for a new location to spend the next period of their lives when the Fort Hays State opportunity arose, Martin said.

“I’m living my dream,” Martin said. “I’m living the American dream through education.

“That’s the message I’m here to pass on to our students. Anything is possible.”

This story was originally published November 23, 2014 at 9:28 PM with the headline "New Fort Hays State president living a dream."