Newly appointed Marymount president Dr. Lucas Lamadrid believes education is enhanced by a multinational student body
Marymount California University’s newly appointed president Dr. Lucas Lamadrid. Photo by David Fairchild
Just a few weeks into his presidency at Marymount California University, Dr. Lucas Lamadrid found himself in a dunk tank, at the urging of his neighbors. He’s living among university students in the school’s residence halls in San Pedro until his family joins him from North Carolina.
“Then on Saturday I went to a gala,” Dr. Lamadrid said with a laugh. “So those are the extremes you operate in.”
Marymount California University, a Catholic, four-year institution whose main campus sits atop Rancho Palos Verdes, recently enlisted Dr. Lamadrid to take the helm as its newest president.
“I’m really looking forward to being a fixture on the Hill,” said the Havana-born, East Coast-bred educator. “But I’ll be honest with you. If it weren’t for the setting I may not have come out here. What I love about the Rancho Palos Verdes area, besides it being tight-knit, is it wants to maintain a rural existence in the midst of a major metropolitan area. That for me is really ideal.”
Marymount California University’s newly appointed president Dr. Lucas Lamadrid prizes engagement with his students. Photo by David Fairchild
Dr. Lamadrid was just two years old when his parents packed a single suitcase and embarked on a journey to the United States with their two kids in tow. His father worked multiple jobs in the paper industry and moved the family around the country, from Florida to New Hampshire then to Massachusetts and Wisconsin, where Dr. Lamadrid attended high school and college.
At Marquette College, a Jesuit institution in Milwaukee, he double-majored in economics and English, with the intention of pursuing business or law. During this time, he found himself becoming fascinated with theological questions. So he went on to pursue a master’s degree in theology at the University of Notre Dame, where he taught freshman writing classes and ran a residence hall of some 550 students.
Inspired by his work with the students, he decided to become a college professor. He went on to earn his doctorate in religion at Duke University, where he would meet his wife Beth, a fellow doctorate student and expert on 16th century history. But upon finishing his doctorate, he found that most universities had frozen teaching jobs due to the economy. He needed a plan B.
“The only thing I liked to do besides studying and teaching was running residence halls at Notre Dame,” he said. “What you’re doing is you’re creating a community that complements the learning they do in the classroom. It was a blast.”
His post as the associate director of resident life at Bellarmine University in Louisville, Kentucky, sparked his decades-long career working with students in higher education. “Working” is actually an understatement. He and his wife lived among them in the college dorms. Their oldest daughter Claire, now 18 and Stanford bound, spent her first years there, too. Her first birthday party was in the student lounge, complete with presents and a cake.
At Bellarmine, he was soon promoted to assistant dean of students and he taught classes in the philosophy department. He would move onto to become dean of students at St. Vincent College in Pennsylvania and then vice president of enrollment and student affairs at Belmont Abbey College in North Carolina. Then he entered the private sector as a senior executive of a company that recruits international students, mostly from China but also from Brazil, Mexico, South Korea and Vietnam.
“Looking at the future I knew international recruitment would be crucial, not only for revenue but that’s where the growth was,” Dr. Lamadrid said. “The neat thing is, with my client base, I got to see that the learning outcomes are improved when you have people from around the world at approximately the same age studying together. The world’s gotten more global than ever before.”
In the last two years alone, he visited some 200 colleges and universities around the country — “all the way from really big systems to smaller liberal arts colleges” — to provide consulting and collect data. He found himself wanting more than to act as a mediator between businesses and schools.
“There wasn’t really any contact with students,” he said. “I really missed that.”
Dr. Lamadrid’s presidency at Marymount California University marks his fated return to campus life, rubbing elbows with students and providing guidance to the budding adults.
“Our life [back then] was in the midst of students,” Dr. Lamadrid said. “It’s helped me to focus on a key principle that many schools and certainly many larger universities have forgotten. That is, at the beginning, middle and end of higher education, it’s all about the student. If you create your managerial system and programs, keeping the student as the key end user of all your processes, then you’re going to have a special place.”
“When I was looking for a school to be president of, I was looking at that as the primary objective. That’s where higher education needs to continue to move toward. And MCU was perfect because it’s all about the student.”
Dr. Lamadrid said his top priorities are increasing enrollment and retention while building brand name recognition for the university, particularly in countries such as China. He also has a vision of establishing a strong business school rooted in entrepreneurship by forming partnerships with neighboring businesses.
He also wants to establish a competitive biotech program as well as physical therapy, nursing and patient advocacy programs. And he wants to introduce technological competence into the university’s liberal arts program.
His theme for his presidency is friendship, one that is rooted in love and faith to God, he said. That friendship, extending far beyond customer service, is already evident in the 10,000 hours that MCU students committed to community service this past year, he said.
“I see the Peninsula as a partner and a benefit to MCU and I see MCU as a partner and benefit to everyone on the Peninsula,” he said. “I hope we can strengthen the bond of friendship between this little jewel of a Catholic university and this jewel of a community.”