ENMU Green & Silver Magazine - April 2018 issue

Dr. Gregory Sawyer Fails at Retirement
Photo by: Tone Stockenstrom
“It matters
not how strait
the gate, how
charged with
punishments
the scroll. I am
the master of
my fate, I am the
captain of my
soul.” –William
Ernest Henley,
“Invictus.”
By: Rachel Forrester
Those words have become the mantra for ENMU
alumnus Dr. Wm. Gregory Sawyer (MA 78), who
recently retired from California State University
Channel Islands (CSUCI) after 16 years as their
founding vice president for Student Affairs.
In his nearly four decades of working with students
as an educator and administrator, Sawyer adopted the
poem “Invictus,” which emphasizes embracing courage
and resilience in the face of adversity, as his way to
encourage, motivate and inspire students when they
felt they were at their lowest point.
“The poem was a way to say that although life had dealt
them some serious blows, they could and would recover.
They may be beat but never beaten!” he explained.
Under his leadership, CSUCI’s Divison of Student Affairs
has been recognized for the past four consecutive
years as one of the nation’s Most Promising Places
to Work for in Student Affairs. In addition to his
administrative work, Dr. Sawyer taught public speaking
courses and regularly ran speech tournaments and
leadership retreats, often using his own upbringing and
experiences to connect with students.
“They would say ‘Doc, you’ve probably always had good
grades.’ But I didn’t,” he revealed. “At one point as an
undergrad I had a 1.0 GPA and that was really difficult for
me because I’d done so well academically in my military
academy high school. My sisters and I always made
good grades. After that I still ended up becoming the
outstanding grad student in communication, so I wanted
students to see that no matter where they were in life,
they too could pull themselves up by their bootstraps.”
Growing up, both of Dr. Sawyer’s
parents taught the importance
of education. His father earned
his undergraduate degree from
Morehouse College and spent
three years postgrad at Howard
University Medical School
before being pulled out to be
an Army medic. Dr. Sawyer’s
mother attended Bennett College
in Greensboro, North Carolina, but transferred and
graduated from The Ohio State University. Sitting
around the dining room table at the Sawyer house was
more like a college study session.
“This type of family engagement helped me and my
sisters to remain motivated throughout our academic
journeys. Knowing that our parents sacrificed and cared
for us made us want to achieve even more for them, and
ourselves,” Dr. Sawyer said.
Pictured: Dr. Wm. Gregory Sawyer with his mom
Betty and his two sisters Leslie and Deborah.
Sawyer applied to a variety of different graduate
programs. He was accepted to all of them but is grateful
that he ultimately choose to become a Greyhound. His
two sisters, Leslie J. Sawyer (MA 82) and Deborah M.
Sawyer (MS 82), were also graduate students at ENMU.
The three siblings all attended private institutions for
their undergraduate degrees, and each one drove all the
way from Ohio to New Mexico to earn their master’s.
“I had a pretty solid educational background before
coming to Eastern, but I think my best academic
experience was at ENMU,” Sawyer said. “All the
things that I learned in terms of the ability to interact
interculturally, to teach, as well as to get up in front of
an audience and speak, I learned there.”
Dr. Sawyer knew he would probably “fail” at retirement,
and after only six weeks he was invited to join Sonoma
State University as the vice president for Student Affairs.
“There were bets on how long I would stay retired,”
Dr. Sawyer explained. “My wife (Dr. Rita Gloria Sawyer)
and I are looking forward to working with this
visionary and very forward-thinking president
(Dr. Sakaki) as we work together to make a difference
in the world through the lens of higher education.”
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Green & Silver | April 2018