Gerry McNulty Oral History Part 3 Transcript
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Part of Gerry McNulty Oral History Part 3
content
Interview with: Gerry McNulty
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY
Transcribed by Lola-Dillon Cahill
For the Marist College Archives and Special Collections
Gerry McNulty
2
Interviewee:
Gerry McNulty
Interviewer:
Gus Nolan and Jan Stivers
Interview Date:
7 December 2022
Location:
James A. Cannavino Library
Topic:
Gus Nolan and Jan Stivers interview former Marist student and professor Gerry McNulty
about his time at Marist.
Subject Headings:
Gerry McNulty
Marist College History
Marist College (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Marist College School of Communication
Summary:
Gus Nolan and Jan Stivers continue their interview with Gerry McNulty and discuss
how he came back to Marist as an employee rather than a student, the internship program he
worked to create for students, and the direction he sees the communication department going.
Gerry McNulty
3
Jan Stivers (
00:01
): Okay, we resume.
Gus Nolan (
00:01
): Go ahead.
JS
(
00:02
): No, no.
GN
(
00:03
): We pick up with Bob Grossman?
Gerry McNulty (
00:05
): Bob Grossman, yes. So Bob Grossman came to our newsroom
and I ended up becoming Bob's, mentor, so to speak.
GN
(
00:13
): Uh-huh <affirmative>.
GM
(
00:13
): And, you know, so we worked very well together. He was on this, kind of faculty
externship, and he was working in our newsroom, and we got to know each other, and we
became very friendly. And it was around that time that Bob Norman had stepped down, and Bill
Davis had taken over the internship program.
GN
(
00:28
): Yeah.
GM
(
00:29
): And I began to observe the students who were coming to me weren't quite sure
what they were doing, what they were supposed to do.
GN
(
00:34
): Yeah.
GM
(
00:34
): And I realized, okay so there had been a qualitative change, which you know, can
happen right, with personnel. And I said to Bob one day, do you know anybody over there that I
could talk to? I mean, I'm an alum, but I don't want to just call out of the blue and start
Gerry McNulty
4
complaining <laugh>. And he said, well, I don't know. He said, you know, we just hired a new
dean in communication. I'll tell you what, Bob said, I'll call him, and ask him if he would, you
know, be willing to speak with you about this. So he calls me up one day, Bob, and he says, so
there's this gentleman, his name is Guy Lometti, Dr. Guy Lometti. And he said he would be
happy to talk to you one day. So I called his office Guy Lometti, and his secretary says, oh, yes,
the dean said he would be happy to speak with you. Would you like to go to lunch? I'm like, I'm
a news guy. I'm like, we don't go to lunch, but yeah, I guess. I mean, that's like <laugh>.
GN
(
01:23
): <Laugh> Yeah.
GM
(
01:26
): So I said, okay. So I meet Guy Lometti at the diner up the street here, and he's very
friendly. But Guy had been, for years, in the Army. He was a very formal person.
GN
(
01:38
): Yes, yes.
GM
(
01:38
): Yeah. You know, and, so we're chatting a little bit back and forth, and I'm telling
him, well, I've been a very active alum, and I've run the alumni golf tournament for, you know,
and I've worked with all these interns, and I'm really a Marist guy. And he's saying to me things
like, do you have an advanced degree? No, I don't have an advanced degree. Have you ever
taught college classes? No, I've never <laugh>. So I leave this meeting thinking like, oh, this,
that was fun, but that's over with. You know, that's over with. Like, that's, I'm not worried about
it anymore. I go home that night, I tell my wife, well, I met this gentleman, you know, but he's
not--
GN
(
02:09
): He's not interested in you.
Gerry McNulty
5
GM
(
02:09
): This is not, he's not interested in--
JS
(
02:12
): He's not listening to the problems that I want to bring.
GM
(
02:14
): Yeah. Like, I know all about the newsroom, and I know all about Marist and I
could help these kids. And I, as I'm, I was telling him, Lometti, I was telling him that I was going
to write for him a description of, what an internship program could be if you, created it separate.
Because it, Bob's role had always been an add-on to teaching.
GN
(
02:34
): Yeah. Right.
GM
(
02:35
): Nothing happens. Two, three weeks go by and one day the phone rings and this,
and now it's Guy Lometti. And he asks me to come over to his office and talk to him. So I go
over to his office and he says, I'd like to hear more about your idea. So I haven't now, I left the
idea, I hadn't really prepared anything. So, but news people learned to think on their feet. So I
<laugh> so I outlined for him, well, if it was a full-time thing, the first thing you could do would
be to integrate career services preparation into the role and have this person prepare the students.
And then they could go through the registration process, the education, the experience
monitoring process. I'm frankly sort of half making this up on the spot. But it is what I had
envisioned. I just had not prepared it, and written an outline for him. Oh, this sounds very
interesting to me, he says <laugh>.
GN
(
03:24
): <Laugh> what do you know?
Gerry McNulty
6
GM
(
03:24
): And he wants me to talk to Dr. John Kelly. And I somewhat remembered Dr. John
Kelly from my student days. He had been a management professor, and he was now I think the
acting, maybe the acting--
GN
(
03:42
): Dean.
GM
(
03:42
): Dean. Academic dean. So a week or two later, I go over to see this Dr. John Kelly,
who's very friendly, and we start telling old Marist stories to each other from 1970s. And once
again, I'm not clear exactly what's happening. And then a day or two later, the phone rings, and
Lometti is offering me a job. And I come to work at Marist as an administrator. I'm like, well,
this is very interesting.
JS
(
04:06
): And you hadn't suspected that was where he was going with this?
GM
(
04:10
): I mean, it seemed to be going there, but it wasn't, it was hard for me to, I had come
from a world in which, when you interviewed for a job in the news business, you interviewed for
the job and they either called you the next day, or you never heard from them again.
GN
(
04:22
): Right.
GM
(
04:23
): They're like, your phone would ring the next day. When can you be here? Or it was
like, Silence. That was it. If you didn't get a call a day or two days later, people would--you
didn't get it?-- yeah, I didn't get it <laugh>. So this, the delay was confusing me. That was a
cultural thing, which I learned in academics, things don't go so quickly. So, it was a terrific offer.
And I said to my wife, I had been working sixty, seventy hour weeks now for a decade. I had
little children, relatively little, adolescent by now. They were adolescent children coming into
Gerry McNulty
7
teenage years. I said, you know, this could be a very interesting change. And, amazingly they
liked my idea. <laugh>. So--
JS
(
05:05
): It emerged from your experience?
GM
(
05:07
): Yeah, it did. It did. So it was, it really was a kind of beneficent happenstance. And
so lo and behold, I called him back and said, I think I can do it. I think I can do it, and I can build
you--I said, the thing that you don't have right now, what you had with Norman was you had a
tremendous, you know,--knowledge--bastion. I mean, he knew everybody. He knew everything.
But he was operating individually with one kid after another. And the program grew under Bob
Norman until he was doing forty or fifty kids. But I knew, in fact, that he was spinning out. He
was getting older, and it was hard to manage. He had never built a system. He was operating on
his own. And then when Bill Davis was doing interim, Bill Davis was not really, you know, all
that interested in it. And I said to him, to Guy Lometti, you need a system. That's what you need.
You need to make it a machine, and then it can run. Yeah. And so we did. And so I came to
Marist and I met several times with the career service people and found out how they did their
registration process, and learned what was necessary for the vetting process for employers, that
type of thing. And I learned, I had to learn a lot more about resumes and, you know, presentation
development, which I did over the course of that first year. And by the end of my first year,
1996, '97, I went to Lometti and said, okay, I'm going to put this into place now. In other words,
the first year I was kind of a caretaker role and I said, I'm going to put it in place now.
GN
(
06:36
): You started in September, the beginning of the semester?
GM
(
06:38
): September '96. Yeah.
Gerry McNulty
8
GN
(
06:40
): Okay. And Bill Davis was still there.
GM
(
06:42
): He was still there in an interim role.
GN
(
06:43
): But he had the courses. He was--
GM
(
06:45
): Yes. He was teaching.
GN
(
06:46
): He wasn't just internship. He was--
GM
(
06:48
): Right. So when I came, to give you an example, and I'm not trying to be
hypercritical of Bill because he inherited this part-time role. When I came, you know, Bill
handed me a cardboard box that had about two dozen or three dozen file folders in it. And these
were fact sheets or info sheets from companies.
GN
(
07:05
): Ah.
GM
(
07:07
): That was it. That was what they had. And there was nothing really in place, you
know. And so I went to Lometti and I said, we need a database. I said, I'm going to go get a kid
from computer science <laugh>. And build a database. We built a database that summer of '97. I
said, we need a database. I'm going to put together like a package of things, like preparatory
things the kids have to do. They have to bring a resume to me. I have to vet it. I'm not going to
register anybody who doesn't go through this gate, you know, gatekeeping process.
GN
(
07:36
): Yeah.
GM
(
07:37
): I said, then every kid who goes out the door, we're going to know that kid was
ready. What their skill level, preparation level was. Every employer that we talk to we're going to
Gerry McNulty
9
know who they are and what they're doing. You know, we're going to know why they want a
student. No more of this stuf, with the first year I experienced people, employers would call up
and say, oh, send me three students. I said to Bill, you're not going to do that, are you? We don't
know who this guy is, <laugh> sending students over to him. So I created a whole outline, if you
will, you know, for, the gatekeeping process. And I put that--
GN
(
08:09
): Were these internships full semester? Or was it like, take two courses?
GM
(
08:15
): Yeah, they were semester long.
GN
(
08:17
): They were semester long.
GM
(
08:18
): Right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
GN
(
08:19
): Okay.
GM
(
08:19
): And they could be--
JS
(
08:20
): And how many credits?
GM
(
08:21
): They could be anywhere from one credit, in those days up to fifteen. Now, a
number of years ago, we reduced the credits down to maximum twelve, because the core--
because the curriculum, not core--because the curriculum went through a modernization process.
GN
(
08:34
): Yeah.
GM
(
08:34
): But in the late nineties, we still were on one of the older communication
curriculums, there were very limited upper-level classes. So the internships were serving as an
Gerry McNulty
10
option in the menu. When you got to be a senior, if you ran out of classes, you would apply
internship credits. And it, that worked for everybody. That did change over time with the
curriculum. So I put this system into place, and it only took me a year or two at that point. And I
was, it was running pretty well, pretty soon we were getting much more, you know, a much
better qualitative experience for the students. I developed an evaluation form that I sent directly.
I mean, I used to get this stuff for the career service people who would say well, you know, we
sent out the evaluation and we didn't get them back. I'm like, well, didn't you call them up? Call
them up and get the evaluation back <laugh>. We want to know what the kid did. Well, they
were, you know, they were dealing with ten majors or fifteen majors. So I was in a position to
chase that. So I did. So pretty quickly, Guy Lometti was very happy that we began to produce,
system-wise, our numbers, our quality, you know, control that was in place. And of course, once
the students themselves learned that there was help, they could come to me. I would do their
resume, I would help them with the search. The, the numbers began to ratchet up. And in two or
three years, we went from a hundred kids enrolled to one hundred fifty to two hundred in three,
four or five years time.
GN
(
09:53
): And the various sites, there was not just journalism, you're going to IBM, you're
going to NBC.
GM
(
09:57
): It was all radio, television, film, advertising, public relations, journalism.
GN
(
10:01
): Yankee Stadium.
GM
(
10:02
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
JS
(
10:02
): So it was internships for the whole school of communication?
Gerry McNulty
11
GM
(
10:05
): Well, not the whole school of communication. Because School of Communication
is composed of communication program. At that time, the communication program was the
communication disciplines as well as TV film disciplines. Separate from that, in the school of
communication is fashion, art, and music. So my component was the communication grouping,
media is probably a better way to understand that. The media centric majors, advertising,
journalism, film, tv, public relations. So, as I say, we pretty quickly ramped it up to having two
hundred and some students. And my peak enrollment, I think was in 2013 or 14. We broke 280
that academic year. So that was the, several times we had broken 260, I think it's like 2013 or so.
We registered 280 students.
JS
(
11:03
): So, and those 280 students are in all kinds of settings?
GM
(
11:08
): Both here locally, domestically, and in New York City, And also internationally. In
1999, I was the internship--I'm sorry--the international director then was actually an old
classmate of mine named Brian Whalen. Dr. Brian Whalen. He had come to Marist in maybe '97
or '98. Brian was very interested in modernizing the internships that were available to study
abroad students. So he came and met with me, and I showed him the models that I had developed
for syllabus, and quality control, and evaluation. And he said, these are great. Can I steal these? I
said, sure. So he went to contacts that he had in Leeds, England, and Dublin, Ireland, and
Sydney, Australia. And he flashed this material, and they said, if you're going to give us this,
we'll put it into practice. So in '99, we launched a new initiative, if you will, of study abroad with
internship component.
JS
(
12:04
): I had students who did that in Dublin, in the schools. Yeah
Gerry McNulty
12
GM
(
12:09
): Yeah. And then some years later, when the Italy campus was opened, the, [pause] I
can't remember, it was before, who was the gentleman that, was it Peter? What is his name?
JS
(
12:24
): John?
GM
(
12:26
): John Peters.
JS
(
12:27
): John Peters.
GM
(
12:27
): So before John, there was somebody doing it, and it might have been--
JS
(
12:30
): Dilip?
GM
(12:30): Might've been, oh, yes. Dilip. That's right. Yes. Dilip. That's who it was. Dilip. So
it was Dilip who had come to me, same thing, and said, I understand you have all these, you
know, systemization of stuff and can <laugh> take it? So they put that into place in Italy, and it,
the internships operated in Italy for a number of years with our models in place.
JS
(
12:53
): Give us a closer look at how you, what are the components of that quality control
system? How do you, and I'm asking this as somebody who had kids in a variety of classrooms,
some of which weren't that great, you know?
GM
(
13:10
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Sure.
JS
(
13:11
): So how did you assure that from one student to the other? The fifteen credits or the
twelve credits they were getting represented the same kind of quality experience.
GM
(
13:22
): Right, so there's a number of components that need to be in place. So, one is
absolutely transparency. So the employer must be, you know, and as an instructor, you learn to
Gerry McNulty
13
look for quality within the description. And then you also learn how to look for quality during
the monitoring process with existing students. So, I would have, you know, Maryann, and she
would be working for United Way, and I would be monitoring her assignments, reading her
assignments. Now, I transitioned from the sort of old fashioned, if you will, or the old way of
writing journals. When I was a student intern, we wrote weekly journals, right? And we gave
them into the teacher. And these were meant to be reflection journals and so forth through your
report. Now, there were numerous problems. I'm sure there was a time when that was an
effective tool, but quickly it becomes an ineffective tool. So, but in the beginning, that was a
reasonable mirror for what the students were doing. And as an instructor, you learn quickly that
there can be a disconnect between the description of the job and so forth, right. And the
experience that the student has.
JS
(
14:37
): Yeah.
GM
(
14:37
): So, you know, in terms of quality control, what I learned to do was to become a
fairly frequent contact for that employer. I would read week two, read week four, pick up the
phone. So Maryann hasn't had anything to do for a week and a half. Why is that? Oh, we'll give
her something to do. Well, that's good. Because Maryann may not know how to ask for that, or
thinks it's great that she's doing nothing. And this is not the point. So it takes those touches, those
frequent contacts, and you have to be monitoring. And clearly, one of the weaknesses in the
traditional instructor system was time on hand. I was a full-time person. This was my job. So I
read every journal every week that they came in, and I was able to make time to contact those
employers. Another thing that I did was site visits. So I told Lometti when I came, you know,
that I was going to try to go to every company. And he said, oh, you know, that's crazy. That's,
Gerry McNulty
14
you know, you have forty, fifty different sites in a semester. I said, well, let me just, you know,
every week I'm going to pick like one day Wednesday or Thursday, and I'm going to go visit four
or five.
GN
(
15:49
): Unannounced?
GM
(
15:50
): Well, no, they would be announced, but, I needed to see firsthand. So, I mean, I
was, you know, whatever, twenty-eight, thirty years old, I didn't belong in MTV, but I got myself
an appointment to go to MTV twice a semester. So I could see what is this MTV thing? What are
the students doing? So I could meet the, you know, the twenty-five-year-old producers who were
supervising my twenty-year-old students. So that was very, very helpful. That was important.
And over a period of years, I developed a relatively high level of knowledge as to what television
students did, what ad agency students did, and I could then turn around and share that knowledge
with students. But also I could be the quality control officer. So when I was being fed a little bit
of a line by some TV producer, I would go, no, this is not, you know, this is so, you know what?
This is your last student, sorry, <laugh>.
JS
(
16:45
): <Laugh> yeah.
GM
(
16:45
): We won't be recommending students to you in the future.
JS
(
16:48
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
GM
(
16:48
): Because you have to be willing to say no. That's how quality control works. And so
it really just took, it took several years, two, three, four years. But pretty soon we had a system in
place where we knew every location that students were going to. We knew what the students
Gerry McNulty
15
were expected to do. We would monitor, I would monitor what they were doing. And if they
weren't performing well, I wanted to know why. Was it a problem the student was having? Was
it something the employer was having? And then one of the, I think the big things that I know
Lometti was thrilled about was he himself would get calls from people who were supervisors in
these places saying, your kids are the best. Send us more kids. They know what they expect to
do. They know what they're supposed to do. There's some guy who calls me up like every six
weeks and asks me what's going on, <laugh>.
GN
(
17:36
): Oh, yeah. Now they weren't talking about the supervisor calling you. We also had a
number of instances where the students don't really show up with--
GM
(
17:44
): That happens.
GN
(
17:45
): With greater regularity, yeah.
GM
(
17:46
): That happens. And so, accountability is important. Yeah. And you know, I would, I
worked with, I don't know, four thousand some students in twenty-five years. And I had to fail
very small numbers. Literally two or three kids a year out of 150 or 200. But I would have to fail
them because, they would not hold up their end.
GN
(
18:10
): It's essentially pass fail.
GM
(
18:13
): It is pass fail.
GN
(
18:14
): Yeah. So it's not A B C D.
GM
(
18:15
): Our system was pass fail.
Gerry McNulty
16
GN
(
18:17
): Yeah. Okay. While still on the value of this, comment about the value of education
when you consider the lecture classroom, teacher being told things and on hand experience for
whatever--
GM
(
18:43
): Right.
GN
(
18:43
): You're involved in.
GM
(
18:45
): Certainly, my experience as a student taught me that I needed both. That's what it
taught me in my years as a college student. I was one of those kids who was sitting in the
classroom taking notes, listening to the professor, writing down, amazing. Like, this is, the stuff
that this guy is saying, wow. Like this was fascinating. But then he wasn't, a professional person.
So then I would go off to like my first semester to this Poughkeepsie Journal newsroom and go,
so these people talk like--now Mimi McAndrew, she worked there--they talk just like her. But,
you know, the other teachers, they don't talk like this. They don't act like this. So I needed both.
GN
(
19:30
): Yeah.
GM
(
19:31
): I needed to take the, you know, communication theory class with Dean Cox and
understand, you know, channel messenger and understand how a message flows and how it
works. But then Dean Cox was not a person from the professional world. So he didn't really
scream at people <laugh> and say, fix the lead on your story. Go back and get two more sources
like, that was a language I needed to learn from this half. So you needed both. They were
complimentary basis of knowledge and skill sets. And that's what made the kids stronger. It was
easy for me to understand. I became the messenger when kids would come in to see me. And I
would say, so you need both. If you're an A- student, that's terrific. But if you go and spend three
Gerry McNulty
17
months at one of these places two days a week, you are going to be smarter because you're going
to understand what it needs.
GN
(
20:19
): You'll know how to write a paper.
GM
(
20:19
): Yes. So they needed both.
GN
(
20:21
): I want to turn the page.
GM
(
20:22
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
GN
(
20:22
): Tell me about students from California coming for internships in New York.
GM
(
20:27
): Ah, so in 2000 or 2001, my dean came to me and said, we need to make revenue.
How are we going to make, we need to make revenue. We need to increase--
GN
(
20:44
): Streams of revenue.
GM
(
20:45
): Yeah, streams of revenue.
GN
(
20:47
): Yeah.
GM
(
20:47
): So I said--he said--how can we, you know, create revenue from the internship
program? And I said to him, Guy, we already create a great deal of revenue from the internship
program. If I were to count up the tuition credit hours that I do, you know, because I have 184
kids enrolled in a calendar year or whatever, 210 kids if I count those up. And he said, well, you
should do that. And so actually, that first year that we talked about this, I did a calculation. Then
I came up with some phenomenal, like, you know, my program is charging $482,000 in tuition,
Gerry McNulty
18
and you're paying for me, one guy's salary and a desk and a phone. So I said, you got it pretty
good right now, <laugh>.
JS
(
21:28
): This is tuition.
GM
(
21:30
): This is pretty good. Yeah, this is, right? But I understood his point. So I said to
him, well, I said, in order to derive more money from tuition, we need to bring in students that
are not already here. These students are already here. They're essentially prepaid. They would
take a class or they would take an internship. So those are not new dollars. So I said, you're
telling me that you want new dollars? We have to bring in new people. So he said, you know,
what is the best thing that you have? I said, well, we have essentially three platforms, if you will,
geographically. We have our domestic internship program, Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Newburgh,
kids who work here, or they work in the summer on Long Island or Philadelphia. That's
domestic. International, very small numbers. But we might have three kids in Leeds, England,
four kids in Sydney, Australia, do an internship a semester. So that's international. New York
City. New York City itself was a major geographic destination. We would have six or eight or
ten kids in the fall, two dozen in the spring, twenty out of fifty in the summer in New York City.
I said, you have to bring in new people. I said, what if we advertised a program for New York
City internships to non-Marist students? And we would sell them the experience just like a study
abroad, except it would be domestic instead of study abroad. And he liked that idea. So we wrote
up a business plan and we--
JS
(
22:55
): And secured housing in New York City.
Gerry McNulty
19
GM
(
22:58
): Yes. We secured housing. So we called it the New York Media Experience
Program. And, I arranged for housing at the 92nd Street Y, which was a student, had a student
dormitory as part of--on its premises. And in the fall of 2003, we enrolled ten I believe, ten
students who came from all over the country, a couple from California and Ohio, and different
places, Maine. And just like a study abroad program, like the famous, like Boston is in Boston
College or whatever, has a big study abroad program. People from all over the country go. So we
signed up these kids, and I was their internship director, and I helped them get placements. And
they lived in New York City. And, this first group, they were very, very curious about Marist. So
they wanted to see the campus. So I bought that, said to Lometti to they want to see the campus,
are you okay with that? So I bought them train tickets and brought them up here and walked
them around the campus <laugh>. But, that never happened again after that. But it was
interesting.
JS
(
23:53
): <Laugh>
GM
(
23:54
): So anyway, so now I had, a sort of independent program of students who were just
in New York City, and we actually created two online classes for that cohort that I taught. And
one was a media ethics class, and the other was a media management, or media business class.
So I was their teacher as well as their internship director and mentor. And I brought them
through that program. And I was allowed to have an assistant then because of this extra
workload. So I was given a part-time assistant. And so I hired a woman who worked sixteen or
eighteen hours a week and did, and was my fallback mostly for the domestic program so that I
was free to do these other things. So we operated the New York Media Experience Program from
2003 until we got discovered. It was a bit of a secret, you see, we didn't want to tell anybody. I
Gerry McNulty
20
mean, Dean Lometti told, you know, his peers, but the Marist students did not know what it was.
We advertised it to other schools.
GN
(
25:02
): Ah.
GM
(
25:02
): They didn't know what it was. And we did not really have a program or system in
place for Marist students to go off to Manhattan and do this.
GN
(
25:11
): Right.
GM
(
25:11
): And it was designed to create new revenue. So there was an inherent conflict or
problem, if we allowed, you know, Jane and John from over in, you know, Fox building
Reservoir or whatever over there in the north side, if we allowed them into the program, that was
not new tuition dollars.
GN
(
25:30
): Right.
GM
(
25:30
): So we sort of had to quietly keep this. Anyway, so we ran it for four or five years.
And, we were paying to advertise, we were paying 20,000, 25,000, $30,000 a year to advertise,
which was somewhat costly, but we were enrolling fifteen, eighteen, or more students a year in
fall and spring. We didn't run it in summer. And the reason we didn't run it in summer was that
summer was a very big time for our program. So there would've been then just a, you know, the
workload issue of how are we going to run something in summer as well as run our own eighty,
ninety kids in the summer with the Marist kids?
GN
(
26:08
): Did you have to place those kids from California?
Gerry McNulty
21
GM
(
26:11
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Yeah.
GN
(
26:12
): You had to place them?
GM
(
26:12
): Yes.
GN
(
26:13
): Okay.
GM
(
26:13
): Yeah.
GN
(
26:15
): And, they paid the semester's--
GM
(
26:17
): They paid the tuition. They took two classes, and they did a nine credit--the
equivalent of a nine credit--internship, which required them to go three or more days a week.
Yeah. So it was very, I think it was very successful. We had pretty good numbers. Ten, twelve
kids a semester, something like that. And then, basically we got discovered the, <laugh>, the
fashion <laugh>, the internship coordinator from fashion, her name was Lydia Biscop. She said,
what is this thing that you do? I'm like, ah so we'll bring these students in from other schools and
it's a revenue thing. She wanted her students to go and live there. I said, well, you have to go talk
to the dean. So she went and talked to the dean and, pretty quickly it was decided that we should
open it up to Marist kids. And I said, well, it's fine. I'm not opposed to it. But I said, once you
open it up to Marist kids, they're going to want to come. And then, you know, you're going to
start to lose out, because there was not an infinite number of seats available, if you will. It was
hard to, like, to handle ten or twelve kids was plenty. So once we were going to try to get into
doing fifteen or twenty, how are we going to balance the workload, you know? Do you want to
make my part-time person full-time? Oh no, we can't do that. Well, <laugh>.
Gerry McNulty
22
JS
(
27:32
): And, how are we going to ensure the quality control that made this such an attractive
program to begin with?
GM
(
27:38
): Yes. So what happened there was, there was a little bit of a, broadening of the
message. So in other words, at the dean level, at the cabinet level, this program was known. It
was not known below that. So the deans and the, you know, the senior cabinet people, they knew
we were bringing in 60,000, $70,000 a year and spending 24,000 on advertising. So we, it was
good for the college, et cetera. Right? But now we were in a situation where there was some, and
I appreciated it, there was some discussion on why can't Marist kids do this as well and so forth.
And so I didn't oppose it or anything. I said, that's fine. We will now, you know, we'll change the
name. So we changed the name to Marist in Manhattan, and the admissions people went through
the roof when they heard this, this is going to be a thing called Marist in Manhattan. They're like,
well, we can market this. I'm like, well, I said, we already marketed actually <laugh>, but
without that name.
GN
(
28:29
): <Laugh> Yeah.
GM
(
28:29
): But we've had lots of kids that worked for Madison Square Garden and NBC News.
You know, that's gone on for two decades. But they were thrilled. And, so we did in fact, open it
up in 2009, I think. And, the fashion girls jumped in, which I can appreciate that. And we got
very good numbers in the communication from television and PR. Those two disciplines were,
extremely good matches for the opportunities in New York. Journalism was less so there, even
then there were fewer journalism positions available. And advertising internships are somewhat
problematic because in the ad industry, everything in the advertising industry, everything is
about competitive paid internships that are largely postgraduate.
Gerry McNulty
23
JS
(
29:20
): Oh, okay.
GM
(
29:20
): So undergraduates generally don't get into internship situations. But PR interns
unpaid as well as paid, tons TV, film tons. So that was where our numbers were.
JS
(
29:34
): Oh, so interesting.
GM
(
29:35
): And, you know, then it began to grow on the domestic side. And conversely, you
know, once it started to grow on the domestic side, and we could only take, we would say, all
right, we're going to take fifteen and next semester we'll take twenty. That's as many as we can
handle. Pretty soon, they started to say, you know, the dean, I forget who was Dean then. And
they started to say to me, well, we, you know, we're going to have to pull this advertising money.
I'm like, well, it's disappear when you pull the advertising money. Because nobody knows who
Marist is. We're paying advertising. And true to form, in two or three years, we had no applicants
from the outside. But by then, now we had fifteen kids a semester going from Marist, so I was
busy. I'm like, it's okay with me. I'm getting a paycheck. I'll do this. So we began to have as
many as, I think we had twenty-six kids one semester. I think we had twenty-four another
semester. So we started to peak.
GN
(
30:27
): Yeah, alright, we're going to have to close this because <laugh>, I'm getting tired.
GM
(
30:31
): <laugh>. It's quite alright.
GN
(
30:32
): And--
JS
(
30:33
): I'm fascinated. Yeah.
Gerry McNulty
24
GN
(
30:35
): Yeah, do you have any particular--
JS
(
30:39
): Just, a wrap up, and that is you retired recently?
GM
(
30:44
): I just retired this May of 2022 after twenty-five wonderful years at Marist. I can
only be grateful for the experiences that I had, at Marist. And--
GN
(
30:57
): We were colleagues for awhile.
JS
(
30:58
): What did The program look like when you left it, and what do you hope, what's your
hope for the program for the future?
GM
(
31:03
): This is a very, sensitive area. My position was not continued [pause], by the dean
who took over, last year <laugh>.
GN
(
31:23
): The communications dean.
GM
(
31:24
): The internship program was essentially--
GN
(
31:28
): Abolished.
GM
(
31:30
): Disassembled.
GN
(
31:31
): Alright.
GM
(
31:31
): By the current dean.
JS
(
31:33
): They don't offer internships?
Gerry McNulty
25
GM
(
31:35
): Well, they offer internships. So it essentially was devolved back to the model that I
had left behind in 1996. There is now an instructor who has a part-time role, supervising credit
bearing interns. The current dean, I can only, I mean, she should speak for herself. It's, I am in no
position to speak for her, but she did not support what we had done for twenty-five years in a
nutshell.
JS
(
32:07
): Wow. Wow
GM
(
32:08
): And, you know, apparently, the VPAA's office supported that because she took my
position and created an assistant dean position, essentially with the salary line.
GN
(
32:22
): Oh, I, yeah.
GM
(
32:24
): And it happened--
JS
(
32:24
): It's interesting, because Gus and I were talking over lunch about how, the internships
are really, I think a manifestation of a Marist mission. Ora et labora.
GM
(
32:38
): Work and pray.
JS
(
32:40
): You know, work and, yeah.
GM
(
32:40
): <Laugh>
JS
(
32:40
): That we, from Dan Kirk's earliest internships with the psych program, with
community psychology, certainly with education, this idea that Marist is not this elite liberal arts
institution where we don't bother with things like career skills. We're happy to be preparing
people for--
Gerry McNulty
26
GM
(
33:01
): Go out into the work world.
JS
(
33:03
): Yes.
GM
(
33:04
): Do it for yourself.
JS
(
33:04
): And to think about what you're doing.
GM
(
33:05
): Yes.
JS
(
33:05
): And to do it well, and to do it to a high standard.
GM
(
33:07
): Yeah.
JS
(
33:08
): So, I'm sorry to hear this because it really does seem to me--
GM
(
33:12
): I do understand that it is not, you know, within my power. You know, I do
understand that, and I certainly am disappointed from a vanity standpoint, but as I say, there is
more than one way to do things. Perhaps, there is a better way.
GN
(
33:33
): Yeah, well, it, to me, it's like stopping practice teaching. You know, let's not, you
know, spend time going to a classroom. You know, better you stay here. We'll keep teaching you
how to teach rather than giving you the chance with chalk to see what you do. And we can
correct you, you know.
JS
(
33:50
): Which, in our field you couldn't do, because it is baked into the accreditation
standards, and the state requirements. You know, there's that, already an acknowledgement from
the highest levels that this is--
Gerry McNulty
27
GM
(
34:01
): Clearly this is a less than popular decision, you know, among the faculty because
they realize, of course, that the students are now coming to them. There is no central resource.
That's what was one of the big values on the faculty side, was that there was a centralized
resource. You know, when Mike came in the door or Jane came in the door, the faculty member
said, you know what? There's an internship person, can teach you all about resumes, all about
searching, supervise you and, go to that person available for you today. And that's gone. So, but--
JS
(
34:32
): That's gone, wow.
GN
(
34:35
): Well, with that sad news.
GM
(
34:38
): <Laugh> No, I know.
GN
(
34:39
): Let's think about the great things that happened and I really, you know, I was
anxious to get you here because I wanted to talk about this aspect of our development. I didn't
know it ended so abruptly. [Phone ringing] But perhaps only for a while, maybe there'd be a
resurrection, you know, and before long. You know, the significance of what it was will come to
light again and maybe changes.
JS
(
35:11
): Also, turn over the--
END OF INTERVIEW
Marist College
Poughkeepsie, NY
Transcribed by Lola-Dillon Cahill
For the Marist College Archives and Special Collections
Gerry McNulty
2
Interviewee:
Gerry McNulty
Interviewer:
Gus Nolan and Jan Stivers
Interview Date:
7 December 2022
Location:
James A. Cannavino Library
Topic:
Gus Nolan and Jan Stivers interview former Marist student and professor Gerry McNulty
about his time at Marist.
Subject Headings:
Gerry McNulty
Marist College History
Marist College (Poughkeepsie, New York)
Marist College School of Communication
Summary:
Gus Nolan and Jan Stivers continue their interview with Gerry McNulty and discuss
how he came back to Marist as an employee rather than a student, the internship program he
worked to create for students, and the direction he sees the communication department going.
Gerry McNulty
3
Jan Stivers (
00:01
): Okay, we resume.
Gus Nolan (
00:01
): Go ahead.
JS
(
00:02
): No, no.
GN
(
00:03
): We pick up with Bob Grossman?
Gerry McNulty (
00:05
): Bob Grossman, yes. So Bob Grossman came to our newsroom
and I ended up becoming Bob's, mentor, so to speak.
GN
(
00:13
): Uh-huh <affirmative>.
GM
(
00:13
): And, you know, so we worked very well together. He was on this, kind of faculty
externship, and he was working in our newsroom, and we got to know each other, and we
became very friendly. And it was around that time that Bob Norman had stepped down, and Bill
Davis had taken over the internship program.
GN
(
00:28
): Yeah.
GM
(
00:29
): And I began to observe the students who were coming to me weren't quite sure
what they were doing, what they were supposed to do.
GN
(
00:34
): Yeah.
GM
(
00:34
): And I realized, okay so there had been a qualitative change, which you know, can
happen right, with personnel. And I said to Bob one day, do you know anybody over there that I
could talk to? I mean, I'm an alum, but I don't want to just call out of the blue and start
Gerry McNulty
4
complaining <laugh>. And he said, well, I don't know. He said, you know, we just hired a new
dean in communication. I'll tell you what, Bob said, I'll call him, and ask him if he would, you
know, be willing to speak with you about this. So he calls me up one day, Bob, and he says, so
there's this gentleman, his name is Guy Lometti, Dr. Guy Lometti. And he said he would be
happy to talk to you one day. So I called his office Guy Lometti, and his secretary says, oh, yes,
the dean said he would be happy to speak with you. Would you like to go to lunch? I'm like, I'm
a news guy. I'm like, we don't go to lunch, but yeah, I guess. I mean, that's like <laugh>.
GN
(
01:23
): <Laugh> Yeah.
GM
(
01:26
): So I said, okay. So I meet Guy Lometti at the diner up the street here, and he's very
friendly. But Guy had been, for years, in the Army. He was a very formal person.
GN
(
01:38
): Yes, yes.
GM
(
01:38
): Yeah. You know, and, so we're chatting a little bit back and forth, and I'm telling
him, well, I've been a very active alum, and I've run the alumni golf tournament for, you know,
and I've worked with all these interns, and I'm really a Marist guy. And he's saying to me things
like, do you have an advanced degree? No, I don't have an advanced degree. Have you ever
taught college classes? No, I've never <laugh>. So I leave this meeting thinking like, oh, this,
that was fun, but that's over with. You know, that's over with. Like, that's, I'm not worried about
it anymore. I go home that night, I tell my wife, well, I met this gentleman, you know, but he's
not--
GN
(
02:09
): He's not interested in you.
Gerry McNulty
5
GM
(
02:09
): This is not, he's not interested in--
JS
(
02:12
): He's not listening to the problems that I want to bring.
GM
(
02:14
): Yeah. Like, I know all about the newsroom, and I know all about Marist and I
could help these kids. And I, as I'm, I was telling him, Lometti, I was telling him that I was going
to write for him a description of, what an internship program could be if you, created it separate.
Because it, Bob's role had always been an add-on to teaching.
GN
(
02:34
): Yeah. Right.
GM
(
02:35
): Nothing happens. Two, three weeks go by and one day the phone rings and this,
and now it's Guy Lometti. And he asks me to come over to his office and talk to him. So I go
over to his office and he says, I'd like to hear more about your idea. So I haven't now, I left the
idea, I hadn't really prepared anything. So, but news people learned to think on their feet. So I
<laugh> so I outlined for him, well, if it was a full-time thing, the first thing you could do would
be to integrate career services preparation into the role and have this person prepare the students.
And then they could go through the registration process, the education, the experience
monitoring process. I'm frankly sort of half making this up on the spot. But it is what I had
envisioned. I just had not prepared it, and written an outline for him. Oh, this sounds very
interesting to me, he says <laugh>.
GN
(
03:24
): <Laugh> what do you know?
Gerry McNulty
6
GM
(
03:24
): And he wants me to talk to Dr. John Kelly. And I somewhat remembered Dr. John
Kelly from my student days. He had been a management professor, and he was now I think the
acting, maybe the acting--
GN
(
03:42
): Dean.
GM
(
03:42
): Dean. Academic dean. So a week or two later, I go over to see this Dr. John Kelly,
who's very friendly, and we start telling old Marist stories to each other from 1970s. And once
again, I'm not clear exactly what's happening. And then a day or two later, the phone rings, and
Lometti is offering me a job. And I come to work at Marist as an administrator. I'm like, well,
this is very interesting.
JS
(
04:06
): And you hadn't suspected that was where he was going with this?
GM
(
04:10
): I mean, it seemed to be going there, but it wasn't, it was hard for me to, I had come
from a world in which, when you interviewed for a job in the news business, you interviewed for
the job and they either called you the next day, or you never heard from them again.
GN
(
04:22
): Right.
GM
(
04:23
): They're like, your phone would ring the next day. When can you be here? Or it was
like, Silence. That was it. If you didn't get a call a day or two days later, people would--you
didn't get it?-- yeah, I didn't get it <laugh>. So this, the delay was confusing me. That was a
cultural thing, which I learned in academics, things don't go so quickly. So, it was a terrific offer.
And I said to my wife, I had been working sixty, seventy hour weeks now for a decade. I had
little children, relatively little, adolescent by now. They were adolescent children coming into
Gerry McNulty
7
teenage years. I said, you know, this could be a very interesting change. And, amazingly they
liked my idea. <laugh>. So--
JS
(
05:05
): It emerged from your experience?
GM
(
05:07
): Yeah, it did. It did. So it was, it really was a kind of beneficent happenstance. And
so lo and behold, I called him back and said, I think I can do it. I think I can do it, and I can build
you--I said, the thing that you don't have right now, what you had with Norman was you had a
tremendous, you know,--knowledge--bastion. I mean, he knew everybody. He knew everything.
But he was operating individually with one kid after another. And the program grew under Bob
Norman until he was doing forty or fifty kids. But I knew, in fact, that he was spinning out. He
was getting older, and it was hard to manage. He had never built a system. He was operating on
his own. And then when Bill Davis was doing interim, Bill Davis was not really, you know, all
that interested in it. And I said to him, to Guy Lometti, you need a system. That's what you need.
You need to make it a machine, and then it can run. Yeah. And so we did. And so I came to
Marist and I met several times with the career service people and found out how they did their
registration process, and learned what was necessary for the vetting process for employers, that
type of thing. And I learned, I had to learn a lot more about resumes and, you know, presentation
development, which I did over the course of that first year. And by the end of my first year,
1996, '97, I went to Lometti and said, okay, I'm going to put this into place now. In other words,
the first year I was kind of a caretaker role and I said, I'm going to put it in place now.
GN
(
06:36
): You started in September, the beginning of the semester?
GM
(
06:38
): September '96. Yeah.
Gerry McNulty
8
GN
(
06:40
): Okay. And Bill Davis was still there.
GM
(
06:42
): He was still there in an interim role.
GN
(
06:43
): But he had the courses. He was--
GM
(
06:45
): Yes. He was teaching.
GN
(
06:46
): He wasn't just internship. He was--
GM
(
06:48
): Right. So when I came, to give you an example, and I'm not trying to be
hypercritical of Bill because he inherited this part-time role. When I came, you know, Bill
handed me a cardboard box that had about two dozen or three dozen file folders in it. And these
were fact sheets or info sheets from companies.
GN
(
07:05
): Ah.
GM
(
07:07
): That was it. That was what they had. And there was nothing really in place, you
know. And so I went to Lometti and I said, we need a database. I said, I'm going to go get a kid
from computer science <laugh>. And build a database. We built a database that summer of '97. I
said, we need a database. I'm going to put together like a package of things, like preparatory
things the kids have to do. They have to bring a resume to me. I have to vet it. I'm not going to
register anybody who doesn't go through this gate, you know, gatekeeping process.
GN
(
07:36
): Yeah.
GM
(
07:37
): I said, then every kid who goes out the door, we're going to know that kid was
ready. What their skill level, preparation level was. Every employer that we talk to we're going to
Gerry McNulty
9
know who they are and what they're doing. You know, we're going to know why they want a
student. No more of this stuf, with the first year I experienced people, employers would call up
and say, oh, send me three students. I said to Bill, you're not going to do that, are you? We don't
know who this guy is, <laugh> sending students over to him. So I created a whole outline, if you
will, you know, for, the gatekeeping process. And I put that--
GN
(
08:09
): Were these internships full semester? Or was it like, take two courses?
GM
(
08:15
): Yeah, they were semester long.
GN
(
08:17
): They were semester long.
GM
(
08:18
): Right. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
GN
(
08:19
): Okay.
GM
(
08:19
): And they could be--
JS
(
08:20
): And how many credits?
GM
(
08:21
): They could be anywhere from one credit, in those days up to fifteen. Now, a
number of years ago, we reduced the credits down to maximum twelve, because the core--
because the curriculum, not core--because the curriculum went through a modernization process.
GN
(
08:34
): Yeah.
GM
(
08:34
): But in the late nineties, we still were on one of the older communication
curriculums, there were very limited upper-level classes. So the internships were serving as an
Gerry McNulty
10
option in the menu. When you got to be a senior, if you ran out of classes, you would apply
internship credits. And it, that worked for everybody. That did change over time with the
curriculum. So I put this system into place, and it only took me a year or two at that point. And I
was, it was running pretty well, pretty soon we were getting much more, you know, a much
better qualitative experience for the students. I developed an evaluation form that I sent directly.
I mean, I used to get this stuff for the career service people who would say well, you know, we
sent out the evaluation and we didn't get them back. I'm like, well, didn't you call them up? Call
them up and get the evaluation back <laugh>. We want to know what the kid did. Well, they
were, you know, they were dealing with ten majors or fifteen majors. So I was in a position to
chase that. So I did. So pretty quickly, Guy Lometti was very happy that we began to produce,
system-wise, our numbers, our quality, you know, control that was in place. And of course, once
the students themselves learned that there was help, they could come to me. I would do their
resume, I would help them with the search. The, the numbers began to ratchet up. And in two or
three years, we went from a hundred kids enrolled to one hundred fifty to two hundred in three,
four or five years time.
GN
(
09:53
): And the various sites, there was not just journalism, you're going to IBM, you're
going to NBC.
GM
(
09:57
): It was all radio, television, film, advertising, public relations, journalism.
GN
(
10:01
): Yankee Stadium.
GM
(
10:02
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
JS
(
10:02
): So it was internships for the whole school of communication?
Gerry McNulty
11
GM
(
10:05
): Well, not the whole school of communication. Because School of Communication
is composed of communication program. At that time, the communication program was the
communication disciplines as well as TV film disciplines. Separate from that, in the school of
communication is fashion, art, and music. So my component was the communication grouping,
media is probably a better way to understand that. The media centric majors, advertising,
journalism, film, tv, public relations. So, as I say, we pretty quickly ramped it up to having two
hundred and some students. And my peak enrollment, I think was in 2013 or 14. We broke 280
that academic year. So that was the, several times we had broken 260, I think it's like 2013 or so.
We registered 280 students.
JS
(
11:03
): So, and those 280 students are in all kinds of settings?
GM
(
11:08
): Both here locally, domestically, and in New York City, And also internationally. In
1999, I was the internship--I'm sorry--the international director then was actually an old
classmate of mine named Brian Whalen. Dr. Brian Whalen. He had come to Marist in maybe '97
or '98. Brian was very interested in modernizing the internships that were available to study
abroad students. So he came and met with me, and I showed him the models that I had developed
for syllabus, and quality control, and evaluation. And he said, these are great. Can I steal these? I
said, sure. So he went to contacts that he had in Leeds, England, and Dublin, Ireland, and
Sydney, Australia. And he flashed this material, and they said, if you're going to give us this,
we'll put it into practice. So in '99, we launched a new initiative, if you will, of study abroad with
internship component.
JS
(
12:04
): I had students who did that in Dublin, in the schools. Yeah
Gerry McNulty
12
GM
(
12:09
): Yeah. And then some years later, when the Italy campus was opened, the, [pause] I
can't remember, it was before, who was the gentleman that, was it Peter? What is his name?
JS
(
12:24
): John?
GM
(
12:26
): John Peters.
JS
(
12:27
): John Peters.
GM
(
12:27
): So before John, there was somebody doing it, and it might have been--
JS
(
12:30
): Dilip?
GM
(12:30): Might've been, oh, yes. Dilip. That's right. Yes. Dilip. That's who it was. Dilip. So
it was Dilip who had come to me, same thing, and said, I understand you have all these, you
know, systemization of stuff and can <laugh> take it? So they put that into place in Italy, and it,
the internships operated in Italy for a number of years with our models in place.
JS
(
12:53
): Give us a closer look at how you, what are the components of that quality control
system? How do you, and I'm asking this as somebody who had kids in a variety of classrooms,
some of which weren't that great, you know?
GM
(
13:10
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. Sure.
JS
(
13:11
): So how did you assure that from one student to the other? The fifteen credits or the
twelve credits they were getting represented the same kind of quality experience.
GM
(
13:22
): Right, so there's a number of components that need to be in place. So, one is
absolutely transparency. So the employer must be, you know, and as an instructor, you learn to
Gerry McNulty
13
look for quality within the description. And then you also learn how to look for quality during
the monitoring process with existing students. So, I would have, you know, Maryann, and she
would be working for United Way, and I would be monitoring her assignments, reading her
assignments. Now, I transitioned from the sort of old fashioned, if you will, or the old way of
writing journals. When I was a student intern, we wrote weekly journals, right? And we gave
them into the teacher. And these were meant to be reflection journals and so forth through your
report. Now, there were numerous problems. I'm sure there was a time when that was an
effective tool, but quickly it becomes an ineffective tool. So, but in the beginning, that was a
reasonable mirror for what the students were doing. And as an instructor, you learn quickly that
there can be a disconnect between the description of the job and so forth, right. And the
experience that the student has.
JS
(
14:37
): Yeah.
GM
(
14:37
): So, you know, in terms of quality control, what I learned to do was to become a
fairly frequent contact for that employer. I would read week two, read week four, pick up the
phone. So Maryann hasn't had anything to do for a week and a half. Why is that? Oh, we'll give
her something to do. Well, that's good. Because Maryann may not know how to ask for that, or
thinks it's great that she's doing nothing. And this is not the point. So it takes those touches, those
frequent contacts, and you have to be monitoring. And clearly, one of the weaknesses in the
traditional instructor system was time on hand. I was a full-time person. This was my job. So I
read every journal every week that they came in, and I was able to make time to contact those
employers. Another thing that I did was site visits. So I told Lometti when I came, you know,
that I was going to try to go to every company. And he said, oh, you know, that's crazy. That's,
Gerry McNulty
14
you know, you have forty, fifty different sites in a semester. I said, well, let me just, you know,
every week I'm going to pick like one day Wednesday or Thursday, and I'm going to go visit four
or five.
GN
(
15:49
): Unannounced?
GM
(
15:50
): Well, no, they would be announced, but, I needed to see firsthand. So, I mean, I
was, you know, whatever, twenty-eight, thirty years old, I didn't belong in MTV, but I got myself
an appointment to go to MTV twice a semester. So I could see what is this MTV thing? What are
the students doing? So I could meet the, you know, the twenty-five-year-old producers who were
supervising my twenty-year-old students. So that was very, very helpful. That was important.
And over a period of years, I developed a relatively high level of knowledge as to what television
students did, what ad agency students did, and I could then turn around and share that knowledge
with students. But also I could be the quality control officer. So when I was being fed a little bit
of a line by some TV producer, I would go, no, this is not, you know, this is so, you know what?
This is your last student, sorry, <laugh>.
JS
(
16:45
): <Laugh> yeah.
GM
(
16:45
): We won't be recommending students to you in the future.
JS
(
16:48
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
GM
(
16:48
): Because you have to be willing to say no. That's how quality control works. And so
it really just took, it took several years, two, three, four years. But pretty soon we had a system in
place where we knew every location that students were going to. We knew what the students
Gerry McNulty
15
were expected to do. We would monitor, I would monitor what they were doing. And if they
weren't performing well, I wanted to know why. Was it a problem the student was having? Was
it something the employer was having? And then one of the, I think the big things that I know
Lometti was thrilled about was he himself would get calls from people who were supervisors in
these places saying, your kids are the best. Send us more kids. They know what they expect to
do. They know what they're supposed to do. There's some guy who calls me up like every six
weeks and asks me what's going on, <laugh>.
GN
(
17:36
): Oh, yeah. Now they weren't talking about the supervisor calling you. We also had a
number of instances where the students don't really show up with--
GM
(
17:44
): That happens.
GN
(
17:45
): With greater regularity, yeah.
GM
(
17:46
): That happens. And so, accountability is important. Yeah. And you know, I would, I
worked with, I don't know, four thousand some students in twenty-five years. And I had to fail
very small numbers. Literally two or three kids a year out of 150 or 200. But I would have to fail
them because, they would not hold up their end.
GN
(
18:10
): It's essentially pass fail.
GM
(
18:13
): It is pass fail.
GN
(
18:14
): Yeah. So it's not A B C D.
GM
(
18:15
): Our system was pass fail.
Gerry McNulty
16
GN
(
18:17
): Yeah. Okay. While still on the value of this, comment about the value of education
when you consider the lecture classroom, teacher being told things and on hand experience for
whatever--
GM
(
18:43
): Right.
GN
(
18:43
): You're involved in.
GM
(
18:45
): Certainly, my experience as a student taught me that I needed both. That's what it
taught me in my years as a college student. I was one of those kids who was sitting in the
classroom taking notes, listening to the professor, writing down, amazing. Like, this is, the stuff
that this guy is saying, wow. Like this was fascinating. But then he wasn't, a professional person.
So then I would go off to like my first semester to this Poughkeepsie Journal newsroom and go,
so these people talk like--now Mimi McAndrew, she worked there--they talk just like her. But,
you know, the other teachers, they don't talk like this. They don't act like this. So I needed both.
GN
(
19:30
): Yeah.
GM
(
19:31
): I needed to take the, you know, communication theory class with Dean Cox and
understand, you know, channel messenger and understand how a message flows and how it
works. But then Dean Cox was not a person from the professional world. So he didn't really
scream at people <laugh> and say, fix the lead on your story. Go back and get two more sources
like, that was a language I needed to learn from this half. So you needed both. They were
complimentary basis of knowledge and skill sets. And that's what made the kids stronger. It was
easy for me to understand. I became the messenger when kids would come in to see me. And I
would say, so you need both. If you're an A- student, that's terrific. But if you go and spend three
Gerry McNulty
17
months at one of these places two days a week, you are going to be smarter because you're going
to understand what it needs.
GN
(
20:19
): You'll know how to write a paper.
GM
(
20:19
): Yes. So they needed both.
GN
(
20:21
): I want to turn the page.
GM
(
20:22
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>.
GN
(
20:22
): Tell me about students from California coming for internships in New York.
GM
(
20:27
): Ah, so in 2000 or 2001, my dean came to me and said, we need to make revenue.
How are we going to make, we need to make revenue. We need to increase--
GN
(
20:44
): Streams of revenue.
GM
(
20:45
): Yeah, streams of revenue.
GN
(
20:47
): Yeah.
GM
(
20:47
): So I said--he said--how can we, you know, create revenue from the internship
program? And I said to him, Guy, we already create a great deal of revenue from the internship
program. If I were to count up the tuition credit hours that I do, you know, because I have 184
kids enrolled in a calendar year or whatever, 210 kids if I count those up. And he said, well, you
should do that. And so actually, that first year that we talked about this, I did a calculation. Then
I came up with some phenomenal, like, you know, my program is charging $482,000 in tuition,
Gerry McNulty
18
and you're paying for me, one guy's salary and a desk and a phone. So I said, you got it pretty
good right now, <laugh>.
JS
(
21:28
): This is tuition.
GM
(
21:30
): This is pretty good. Yeah, this is, right? But I understood his point. So I said to
him, well, I said, in order to derive more money from tuition, we need to bring in students that
are not already here. These students are already here. They're essentially prepaid. They would
take a class or they would take an internship. So those are not new dollars. So I said, you're
telling me that you want new dollars? We have to bring in new people. So he said, you know,
what is the best thing that you have? I said, well, we have essentially three platforms, if you will,
geographically. We have our domestic internship program, Poughkeepsie, Beacon, Newburgh,
kids who work here, or they work in the summer on Long Island or Philadelphia. That's
domestic. International, very small numbers. But we might have three kids in Leeds, England,
four kids in Sydney, Australia, do an internship a semester. So that's international. New York
City. New York City itself was a major geographic destination. We would have six or eight or
ten kids in the fall, two dozen in the spring, twenty out of fifty in the summer in New York City.
I said, you have to bring in new people. I said, what if we advertised a program for New York
City internships to non-Marist students? And we would sell them the experience just like a study
abroad, except it would be domestic instead of study abroad. And he liked that idea. So we wrote
up a business plan and we--
JS
(
22:55
): And secured housing in New York City.
Gerry McNulty
19
GM
(
22:58
): Yes. We secured housing. So we called it the New York Media Experience
Program. And, I arranged for housing at the 92nd Street Y, which was a student, had a student
dormitory as part of--on its premises. And in the fall of 2003, we enrolled ten I believe, ten
students who came from all over the country, a couple from California and Ohio, and different
places, Maine. And just like a study abroad program, like the famous, like Boston is in Boston
College or whatever, has a big study abroad program. People from all over the country go. So we
signed up these kids, and I was their internship director, and I helped them get placements. And
they lived in New York City. And, this first group, they were very, very curious about Marist. So
they wanted to see the campus. So I bought that, said to Lometti to they want to see the campus,
are you okay with that? So I bought them train tickets and brought them up here and walked
them around the campus <laugh>. But, that never happened again after that. But it was
interesting.
JS
(
23:53
): <Laugh>
GM
(
23:54
): So anyway, so now I had, a sort of independent program of students who were just
in New York City, and we actually created two online classes for that cohort that I taught. And
one was a media ethics class, and the other was a media management, or media business class.
So I was their teacher as well as their internship director and mentor. And I brought them
through that program. And I was allowed to have an assistant then because of this extra
workload. So I was given a part-time assistant. And so I hired a woman who worked sixteen or
eighteen hours a week and did, and was my fallback mostly for the domestic program so that I
was free to do these other things. So we operated the New York Media Experience Program from
2003 until we got discovered. It was a bit of a secret, you see, we didn't want to tell anybody. I
Gerry McNulty
20
mean, Dean Lometti told, you know, his peers, but the Marist students did not know what it was.
We advertised it to other schools.
GN
(
25:02
): Ah.
GM
(
25:02
): They didn't know what it was. And we did not really have a program or system in
place for Marist students to go off to Manhattan and do this.
GN
(
25:11
): Right.
GM
(
25:11
): And it was designed to create new revenue. So there was an inherent conflict or
problem, if we allowed, you know, Jane and John from over in, you know, Fox building
Reservoir or whatever over there in the north side, if we allowed them into the program, that was
not new tuition dollars.
GN
(
25:30
): Right.
GM
(
25:30
): So we sort of had to quietly keep this. Anyway, so we ran it for four or five years.
And, we were paying to advertise, we were paying 20,000, 25,000, $30,000 a year to advertise,
which was somewhat costly, but we were enrolling fifteen, eighteen, or more students a year in
fall and spring. We didn't run it in summer. And the reason we didn't run it in summer was that
summer was a very big time for our program. So there would've been then just a, you know, the
workload issue of how are we going to run something in summer as well as run our own eighty,
ninety kids in the summer with the Marist kids?
GN
(
26:08
): Did you have to place those kids from California?
Gerry McNulty
21
GM
(
26:11
): Mm-Hmm. <affirmative> Yeah.
GN
(
26:12
): You had to place them?
GM
(
26:12
): Yes.
GN
(
26:13
): Okay.
GM
(
26:13
): Yeah.
GN
(
26:15
): And, they paid the semester's--
GM
(
26:17
): They paid the tuition. They took two classes, and they did a nine credit--the
equivalent of a nine credit--internship, which required them to go three or more days a week.
Yeah. So it was very, I think it was very successful. We had pretty good numbers. Ten, twelve
kids a semester, something like that. And then, basically we got discovered the, <laugh>, the
fashion <laugh>, the internship coordinator from fashion, her name was Lydia Biscop. She said,
what is this thing that you do? I'm like, ah so we'll bring these students in from other schools and
it's a revenue thing. She wanted her students to go and live there. I said, well, you have to go talk
to the dean. So she went and talked to the dean and, pretty quickly it was decided that we should
open it up to Marist kids. And I said, well, it's fine. I'm not opposed to it. But I said, once you
open it up to Marist kids, they're going to want to come. And then, you know, you're going to
start to lose out, because there was not an infinite number of seats available, if you will. It was
hard to, like, to handle ten or twelve kids was plenty. So once we were going to try to get into
doing fifteen or twenty, how are we going to balance the workload, you know? Do you want to
make my part-time person full-time? Oh no, we can't do that. Well, <laugh>.
Gerry McNulty
22
JS
(
27:32
): And, how are we going to ensure the quality control that made this such an attractive
program to begin with?
GM
(
27:38
): Yes. So what happened there was, there was a little bit of a, broadening of the
message. So in other words, at the dean level, at the cabinet level, this program was known. It
was not known below that. So the deans and the, you know, the senior cabinet people, they knew
we were bringing in 60,000, $70,000 a year and spending 24,000 on advertising. So we, it was
good for the college, et cetera. Right? But now we were in a situation where there was some, and
I appreciated it, there was some discussion on why can't Marist kids do this as well and so forth.
And so I didn't oppose it or anything. I said, that's fine. We will now, you know, we'll change the
name. So we changed the name to Marist in Manhattan, and the admissions people went through
the roof when they heard this, this is going to be a thing called Marist in Manhattan. They're like,
well, we can market this. I'm like, well, I said, we already marketed actually <laugh>, but
without that name.
GN
(
28:29
): <Laugh> Yeah.
GM
(
28:29
): But we've had lots of kids that worked for Madison Square Garden and NBC News.
You know, that's gone on for two decades. But they were thrilled. And, so we did in fact, open it
up in 2009, I think. And, the fashion girls jumped in, which I can appreciate that. And we got
very good numbers in the communication from television and PR. Those two disciplines were,
extremely good matches for the opportunities in New York. Journalism was less so there, even
then there were fewer journalism positions available. And advertising internships are somewhat
problematic because in the ad industry, everything in the advertising industry, everything is
about competitive paid internships that are largely postgraduate.
Gerry McNulty
23
JS
(
29:20
): Oh, okay.
GM
(
29:20
): So undergraduates generally don't get into internship situations. But PR interns
unpaid as well as paid, tons TV, film tons. So that was where our numbers were.
JS
(
29:34
): Oh, so interesting.
GM
(
29:35
): And, you know, then it began to grow on the domestic side. And conversely, you
know, once it started to grow on the domestic side, and we could only take, we would say, all
right, we're going to take fifteen and next semester we'll take twenty. That's as many as we can
handle. Pretty soon, they started to say, you know, the dean, I forget who was Dean then. And
they started to say to me, well, we, you know, we're going to have to pull this advertising money.
I'm like, well, it's disappear when you pull the advertising money. Because nobody knows who
Marist is. We're paying advertising. And true to form, in two or three years, we had no applicants
from the outside. But by then, now we had fifteen kids a semester going from Marist, so I was
busy. I'm like, it's okay with me. I'm getting a paycheck. I'll do this. So we began to have as
many as, I think we had twenty-six kids one semester. I think we had twenty-four another
semester. So we started to peak.
GN
(
30:27
): Yeah, alright, we're going to have to close this because <laugh>, I'm getting tired.
GM
(
30:31
): <laugh>. It's quite alright.
GN
(
30:32
): And--
JS
(
30:33
): I'm fascinated. Yeah.
Gerry McNulty
24
GN
(
30:35
): Yeah, do you have any particular--
JS
(
30:39
): Just, a wrap up, and that is you retired recently?
GM
(
30:44
): I just retired this May of 2022 after twenty-five wonderful years at Marist. I can
only be grateful for the experiences that I had, at Marist. And--
GN
(
30:57
): We were colleagues for awhile.
JS
(
30:58
): What did The program look like when you left it, and what do you hope, what's your
hope for the program for the future?
GM
(
31:03
): This is a very, sensitive area. My position was not continued [pause], by the dean
who took over, last year <laugh>.
GN
(
31:23
): The communications dean.
GM
(
31:24
): The internship program was essentially--
GN
(
31:28
): Abolished.
GM
(
31:30
): Disassembled.
GN
(
31:31
): Alright.
GM
(
31:31
): By the current dean.
JS
(
31:33
): They don't offer internships?
Gerry McNulty
25
GM
(
31:35
): Well, they offer internships. So it essentially was devolved back to the model that I
had left behind in 1996. There is now an instructor who has a part-time role, supervising credit
bearing interns. The current dean, I can only, I mean, she should speak for herself. It's, I am in no
position to speak for her, but she did not support what we had done for twenty-five years in a
nutshell.
JS
(
32:07
): Wow. Wow
GM
(
32:08
): And, you know, apparently, the VPAA's office supported that because she took my
position and created an assistant dean position, essentially with the salary line.
GN
(
32:22
): Oh, I, yeah.
GM
(
32:24
): And it happened--
JS
(
32:24
): It's interesting, because Gus and I were talking over lunch about how, the internships
are really, I think a manifestation of a Marist mission. Ora et labora.
GM
(
32:38
): Work and pray.
JS
(
32:40
): You know, work and, yeah.
GM
(
32:40
): <Laugh>
JS
(
32:40
): That we, from Dan Kirk's earliest internships with the psych program, with
community psychology, certainly with education, this idea that Marist is not this elite liberal arts
institution where we don't bother with things like career skills. We're happy to be preparing
people for--
Gerry McNulty
26
GM
(
33:01
): Go out into the work world.
JS
(
33:03
): Yes.
GM
(
33:04
): Do it for yourself.
JS
(
33:04
): And to think about what you're doing.
GM
(
33:05
): Yes.
JS
(
33:05
): And to do it well, and to do it to a high standard.
GM
(
33:07
): Yeah.
JS
(
33:08
): So, I'm sorry to hear this because it really does seem to me--
GM
(
33:12
): I do understand that it is not, you know, within my power. You know, I do
understand that, and I certainly am disappointed from a vanity standpoint, but as I say, there is
more than one way to do things. Perhaps, there is a better way.
GN
(
33:33
): Yeah, well, it, to me, it's like stopping practice teaching. You know, let's not, you
know, spend time going to a classroom. You know, better you stay here. We'll keep teaching you
how to teach rather than giving you the chance with chalk to see what you do. And we can
correct you, you know.
JS
(
33:50
): Which, in our field you couldn't do, because it is baked into the accreditation
standards, and the state requirements. You know, there's that, already an acknowledgement from
the highest levels that this is--
Gerry McNulty
27
GM
(
34:01
): Clearly this is a less than popular decision, you know, among the faculty because
they realize, of course, that the students are now coming to them. There is no central resource.
That's what was one of the big values on the faculty side, was that there was a centralized
resource. You know, when Mike came in the door or Jane came in the door, the faculty member
said, you know what? There's an internship person, can teach you all about resumes, all about
searching, supervise you and, go to that person available for you today. And that's gone. So, but--
JS
(
34:32
): That's gone, wow.
GN
(
34:35
): Well, with that sad news.
GM
(
34:38
): <Laugh> No, I know.
GN
(
34:39
): Let's think about the great things that happened and I really, you know, I was
anxious to get you here because I wanted to talk about this aspect of our development. I didn't
know it ended so abruptly. [Phone ringing] But perhaps only for a while, maybe there'd be a
resurrection, you know, and before long. You know, the significance of what it was will come to
light again and maybe changes.
JS
(
35:11
): Also, turn over the--
END OF INTERVIEW