Georgia Southern University’s new president, Dr. Kyle Marrero, grew up in a musical and theatrical family and is part of one now. Passion for learning and attention to detail, essential for musical performance, are qualities he seeks to model as a university administrator.

In an interview Wednesday, he asked us to think about how his past as a music professor relates to his current job. Marrero comes to Georgia Southern from the University of West Georgia, where he was president for almost six years. But all of his degrees are in music, specifically vocal performance, including a bachelor’s and a master’s, both from Bowling Green State University in Ohio, and his Doctorate of Musical Arts from the University of Michigan.

“Think about it,” he said. “You’re teaching these young people who have dreams and aspirations to be performers. Well, what do you think the percentage is of the likelihood that they’re going to make their career just performing?”

He didn’t cite a number, but of course the answer is that very few actually do that.

“And so my passion was to help educate the entire, whole person so that it could adapt to any environment,” he said.

It’s also true that he has a record of building partnerships among educational institutions and raising money and community support. He will need those skills to overcome funding challenges and a drop in enrollment.

Born to the arts

But Georgia Southern University’s new president is from his beginnings a musician with interests in math and engineering.

Marrero was born in Puerto Rico. His father, who’s Puerto Rican, and his mother, who’s Irish, met in California while pursuing futures in the performing arts. He wasn’t born backstage with a trunk as a crib, but it’s almost one of those stories.

“Now, I can go a whole story if you want to hear about my folks,” Marrero said, laughing. “They met at the Pasadena Playhouse for Performing Arts, and their schoolmates were Dustin Hoffman, Gene Hackman, Ruth Buzzi, and so my father got a job directing a soap opera in Puerto Rico after they graduated, and I was born, my sister was born, and then I grew up in New Mexico.”

From college until now, Marrero has played the piano a little, as singers do, he said, “the essential instrument to learn all music by.” But from fourth grade he played the trumpet, and in the band through high school.

So expect to see him during halftime at Eagles games on the field taking an interest in the marching band. “I love it, just every part of it,” he said.

It was also back in high school that Marrero began signing with choirs. “Choir and calculus, there you have it,” he said.

He had nominations pending to West Point and the Air Force Academy to study engineering, he said, when he decided to major in music instead, starting at Arizona State.

After completing his degrees at Bowling Green and Michigan, he started teaching as an assistant professor at Louisiana State University, rising through the academic ranks there 1994-2005.

Opera singer Jane

His first year at LSU, he met his wife, Jane, and they married in 1995. Dr. Jane Marrero’s doctorate, from LSU, is also in vocal performance.

For 15 years, she performed throughout the United States, and at times internationally, as an opera singer, specifically a lyric coloratura soprano.

“For the first 15 years of the marriage she was gone 230-40 days a year, singing,” Kyle Marrero said. “So we both were blessed to have incredible careers and opportunity, and then when the time was right we wanted to raise a family.”

Their daughter Lily is now 9, and her parents have been married almost 24 years.

Opera director Kyle

Her father also has had a secondary career in opera. While at Louisiana State he began running seasonal opera companies, starting as artistic director of Opera Southwest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where he grew up.

In 2005 Marrero left LSU to become chair of the music department and director of the School of Fine and Performing Arts at the University of West Florida in Pensacola so he could combine his academic career with running the Pensacola Opera.

His success in fund-raising for the opera helped land him an interim appointment in 2009 as the University of West Florida’s vice president for university advancement, and he was soon asked to stay in the permanent job.

Fundraising success

While there he completed West Florida's first capital campaign, which raised $40 million, and when he left, the university was $15 million into another campaign. This information was supplied by Jennifer Wise, Georgia Southern’s director of communications, in follow-up to Marrero’s statements about fundraising at West Florida.

As school director and then vice president, Marrero was with the University of West Florida 2005-2013. But he remained the Pensacola Opera’s artistic director for 18 years, 2000-2017, continuing in that role and producing two operas a year, for several years after being hired as president of the University of West Georgia in 2015.

He was nominated for the West Georgia job and called by a search firm. Marrero remembers warning the recruiters with something like, “Y’all know all my degrees are in music and I’m not your normal pedigree.”

But think about it.

“When I’m performing a piece, I have to in essence know the period of the composition, the stylistic traits, where the ornaments are on the beat or off the beat, what the cadenza should be like based on performance practice, what the tempo markings are, the key signature, and be creative within that and make it my performance. …,” Marrero said Wednesday.

“Those same parameters, I believe, align perfectly with those of being a higher-ed. administrator,” he continued.  “You’re given rules, regulations, compliance, all of those other parts of the job that you have to drive between those, but then at the end of the day you’re trying to be creative with the outcome of impacting students and their opportunity and their environment.”

But as for all of the usual steps to becoming a university president, in this case of Georgia’s fifth -largest university, with upwards of 26,000 students on three campuses, Marrero, now 56, has done that.

K-16 collaborative

One of his achievements at West Georgia was founding the Carrollton-Carroll County Education Collaborative. This effort to align education “K-16,” from kindergarten through college, has grown to involve school systems, independent schools and business leaders in five counties, was well as the university and West Georgia Technical College.

Expect to read more about that later, as Marrero wants to start such a collaborative involving the larger number of school systems around Georgia Southern’s campuses in Savannah, Statesboro and Hinesville.

Getting involved

President Marrero planned to lead “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” during the stretch at the Eagles baseball game Wednesday at Grayson Stadium in Savannah, where his wife was to sing the National Anthem. She will not be an employee of the university, since state policy forbids a president’s spouse from working at the same institution.

They have purchased Averitt Center for the Arts season tickets, as well as a home in or near Statesboro. He called the Statesboro campus’ Performing Arts Center “this beautiful facility,” and noted a scheduled opera performance. At West Georgia, the Marreros hosted kickoff parties at their home to raise money for the university’s performing arts series.

“We embrace communities which we’re part of,” he said. “We’ve loved every place we’ve lived, and we know we’re going to love Statesboro – and Savannah.”

Herald reporter Al Hackle may be reached at (912) 489-9458.