Post by FIUBlue82 on Sept 10, 2006 10:14:49 GMT -5
Great article. We're coming up on Maidique's 20th anniversary at the helm at our institution. I'm glad to know him personally and to have seen first hand all the great strides we've made in his tenure - architecture school, law school, football, med school, Carnegia Research I, Phi Beta Kappa, etc.
www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15473205.htm
Both criticism and praise for Maidique
New buildings and professional programs, more students: FIU's president achieves a lot -- but praise isn't always unanimous.
By FABIOLA SANTIAGO
fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com
On a scorching summer morning, Mitch Maidique neatly folds his navy blue jacket in the back seat of a golf cart, hops in behind the wheel, and deftly steers it out of his Italian villa-style presidential home at Florida International University's West Miami-Dade campus.
He drives past a cluster of buildings in hues of Mediterranean terra cotta, then stops at the College of Architecture and the Arts, designed by a prominent New York architect and awash in bright red and yellow.
''My pride and joy,'' Maidique calls it.
Then, it's off to the new law school under construction, where the interior courtyard was inspired by the symmetry of Rome's Cloister of St. Giovanni in Laterano, Maidique says. He also notes that he walked St. Peter's Square in Rome -- the periphery of all 300,000 square feet of it -- ''and measured it'' to ensure that FIU's main entrance on Southwest Eighth Street and 112th Avenue, with the colonnades at each side, ''would embrace you, have the same welcoming feel'' as at the Vatican.
To outsiders, Maidique's enthusiasm may come off as hyperbole. But to Modesto ''Mitch'' Maidique, celebrating his 20th anniversary as president of FIU, the grandeur is serious business. More than metaphor, it stands for the high standards Maidique set for himself and for the fledgling commuter university when he became its fourth president on Oct. 12, 1986.
''I deeply believe that FIU is destined to become one of the world's great universities,'' he said after being named.
It was a different Miami then, divided over the rise to power of Cuban Americans, and his appointment generated concerns about FIU becoming ''a Cuban university'' and about the former Stanford University professor and wealthy entrepreneur with no experience in university administration.
Maidique inherited a university that had experienced tremendous growth and academic achievement since it opened on an old airfield off Southwest Eighth Street in 1972 with 5,667 students, the largest opening-day enrollment in U.S. college history. The engineering program was on its way to becoming an engineering school. The hospitality program had earned a national reputation.
''What I found was a nascent university with a committed faculty, determined to make something out of this place,'' Maidique says.
Today, world-class status doesn't seem such a far-fetched goal as FIU basks in unprecedented growth: an architecture school, a law school, a performing arts center, a museum and spectacular art collections, Division I-A football, multimillion-dollar research grants and, this year, the approval of a medical school, set to open in the fall of 2008.
Five buildings are under construction at a cost of $140 million at the University Park and Biscayne Bay campuses. Research grants total $80 million, enough to land FIU the second-highest ranking in the Carnegie Foundation's classification system of research universities, but not enough to catapult FIU into the league of older institutions like the University of Florida's $494 million in research grants.
There's a record-breaking enrollment of 38,500 students, more than double the number 20 years ago. The university continues to draw most of its students from South Florida although a growing number are coming from elsewhere in the state and nation. Admission standards have risen slightly for undergraduates, as have SAT scores and grade point averages, but Maidique says he wants the university to remain accessible. The law school, however, has a stricter acceptance rate as 2,000 applicants competed for 110 spots this fall.
Driving it all is 66-year-old Maidique -- engineer by training but architect at heart, demanding boss, suave Latin dancer, newlywed for the fourth time (to Nancy Aguero, an FIU graduate who had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average), a long-distance grandpa who doesn't hesitate to drop to the floor to play.
But most of all, Maidique is the university's best salesman who exults that ``great things are happening at FIU and you want to be a part of it.''
His request for next year, from a mix of public and private sources: $45 million for capital improvements.
''He's not an incremental thinker,'' says David R. Parker, chief operating officer of The Archstone Partnerships, a New York hedge fund, and chairman of the 13-member FIU board of trustees. ``He is a strategic thinker and is not afraid of the big thought. What he has created through his leadership is a tremendous asset to this community.''
Many in higher education affirm that Maidique's vision was timely and in line with what Miami also was becoming -- international, distinguished in the arts and architecture.
''He came in, he had a vision, he pursued the vision, he was persistent, determined,'' says Mark Rosenberg, who is now chancellor of the state university system and who, under Maidique, was FIU provost for seven years. ``Vision is the art of seeing the impossible. Mitch saw the impossible and made it the inevitable. That is leadership.''
Says Chief Financial Officer Vivian A. Sánchez, lured to FIU by Maidique two years ago from the echelons of international banking: ``He's an entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur always wants to do more. You become enthralled with the possibilities.''
Fiercely competitive, Maidique is not shy about trumpeting his role in FIU's growth.
''How many university presidents can claim an architecture school, a law school and a medical school under their leadership?'' he recently asked a group of student government leaders.
Nobody knows.
''Two,'' Maidique says.
''And do you know who the other is?'' he asks.
No right answers.
''Thomas Jefferson!'' Maidique says, referring to the third U.S. president's role in designing the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville.
''And I am giving him credit for a design and arts school,'' he adds.
Everyone laughs.
''When he says things like that, [it shows] he has a great sense of humor and he [acts] 20 years younger than he is,'' says student Alex Prado, 22.
Some alumni and staff members agree.
''FIU is the house that Maidique built,'' says José W. Pérez, an independent art curator who graduated from FIU in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts. ``It was his perseverance that has made FIU what it is.''
* * *
But praise is not unanimous. Some see Maidique as an imperial leader who doesn't consult the faculty and students on key issues.
Shortly after assuming the presidency in 1986, Maidique set aside the school symbol -- the Sunblazer -- and unveiled the Golden Panther, sparking a controversy because he didn't consult students and faculty.
''What is a Sunblazer?'' he challenged.
He also angered many across the state when he proposed to change FIU's name to the University of Florida at Miami, and years later when he launched a football program without consulting the faculty.
Parker, who as a trustee is one of Maidique's bosses, says the naysayers misread Maidique.
''He is persuasive, but he listens to people,'' Parker says. ``Sometimes he might give an impression that he doesn't, but he does. He has such a challenging intellect that people think he is a little imperial from time to time. But if that is what I get with the package, so be it. I'll take a little imperial.''
The board of trustees signed a three-year contract with Maidique in June, paying him $542,608 the first year, including an $80,000 bonus. Parker says the board hired a law and accounting firm to evaluate Maidique's compensation. ''It's a fine salary because he is one of the best in the nation, he has been at the university for 20 years with an important list of accomplishments, and he consistently demonstrates high levels of energy and enthusiasm,'' Parker says.
Maidique's energy is often on display.
Throughout a tour of the campus, Maidique invokes grand images of Europe that he says have influenced the architectural enhancements at FIU -- the Palais-Royal and Parc de la Villette in Paris. The chief designer of the pyramid project at the Louvre, Yann Weymouth, is the architect of FIU's Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, he notes.
''This is my law school,'' he says, pulling into the construction site and explaining that one of New York's foremost architects, Robert A.M. Stern, designed it.
Maidique is equally proud of the sports program. When he runs into sophomore Alex Galindo, who the night before scored a record-setting 39 points in a basketball game, Maidique is as star-struck as a teenage girl meeting a rock idol.
He struts up to Galindo, shakes his hand, pats his back, and at machine-gun speed, recaps Galindo's performance.
* * *
''The only thing modest about Modesto is his name,'' jokes Miami architect Raúl Rodríguez, who designed FIU's $2.5 million, 9,000-square-foot University House, where Maidique lives at the entrance to the University Park campus in West Miami-Dade.
The extravagance of Maidique's style, to some an effective sales pitch, also has gotten him in trouble.
A Miami Herald review of his expenses earlier this year found that Maidique sometimes traveled first-class, booked limousine rides instead of taxis, and spent $516 a night for a hotel in Paris while on university business.
Maidique explains that his choices had to do more with ''efficiency'' than flash, but he returned $2,950 for ``cases in which the line between personal and university [business] was not clear.''
''I think he let himself get into minor incidents of overexpenditure because he wasn't attentive to the details of what he was doing,'' Parker says. ``But that has been fixed, attitudinally and with controls. Things happen. It was very unfortunate for him, but it is a tiny issue in the context of what he has been doing for 20 years.''
But the expenditure story followed a longer-running issue -- a labor feud with the faculty, spawned by the dissolution of the state's Board of Regents.
When the state authorized the universities' separate boards of trustees to negotiate their own contracts, the FIU faculty went without a contract for three years. That led the faculty union's president to declare ''war'' on the administration and the Faculty Senate to pass a resolution in December expressing ''grave concerns'' about Maidique's leadership.
A new contract wasn't reached until February.
''His relations with faculty are a whole lot better because we have a bargaining agreement, but we didn't have one for three years,'' says Carmela McIntire, at FIU since 1981 and chair of the English Department. ``That was very unpleasant and demoralizing for the faculty.''
Some in the faculty also worry that the rapid growth -- specifically, the additions of law, medicine and football -- has come at the expense of other programs.
''The push seemed to supercede everything else for a while,'' McIntire says. ``Cam- puswide, we just don't have enough resources. We're still underfunded per student.''
Maidique agrees with McIntire on the funding issue, but notes that it is the result of ``Florida not funding its university system in a manner consistent with the rest of the country.''
The football team, he says, is funded by student fees. The budget for construction comes from capital improvement funds that are separate from operational costs, which include per-student expenditures.
''You need the space to accommodate students, faculty and expanding programs,'' he says. ``I am looking forward to the next 20 years -- not next week.''
The faculty feels that Maidique has been ''distant from us,'' McIntire says. ``He doesn't do the day-to-day, but if there is a problem, he does pay attention.''
After she complained in a meeting that her department, housed in the second-oldest building on campus, had carpets that hadn't been changed since 1971, Maidique showed up for a two-hour visit.
Shortly afterward, the department got a makeover.
Likewise, on the campus tour, Maidique asks faculty lounge staff members and professors having lunch how they like the renovations. When they complain about buffet items being too far to reach and the hostess podium being too tall, Maidique promises to fix them.
Such attention to design is rooted in personal history. Behind the crown of university president and Maidique's four degrees in engineering from MIT is a man whose dream was to become an architect.
'Back in Cuba, they used to say, `Los arquitectos se mueren de hambre,' '' Maidique remembers. That means ``Architects die of hunger.''
* * *
Maidique grew up with a quixotic drive to succeed, fueled largely by his family's prominence in politics, education and history. His grandfather fought in the war of independence against Spain and owned extensive parts of the city of Ciego de Avila in eastern Cuba, where a neighborhood is still named ``Reparto Maidique.''
His father, Modesto, a senator in Cuba, was gunned down while leaving his lawyer's office in Havana when the son was 11 months old. Modesto Sr. had taken part in a duel with another senator in 1931 and killed him. The killing of Modesto Sr., many believe, was motivated by political rivalry.
Mitch Maidique's mother, Hilda Rodríguez Sarabia, was so distraught the family sent her to the United States to distract her. She eventually married a New Yorker, Max Finkelstein, manager of the now defunct Crawford's department store, and she took young Mitch with her to live first in New York, then in Texas.
While attending P.S. 69 in Queens, Maidique says, he learned ``the value of ethnic solidarity.''
At the public school, a group of older boys were picking on him every day and taking his cap. Looking for a solution, he came upon ``the only other Cuban in the school -- a 17-year-old giant.''
Maidique says that the 17-year-old told the younger kids: 'This is my brother, you mess with him, you are messing with me. You want to take him on? Just one. Let's do it right now, right here. All five? You got me in, so don't bug him anymore.' ''
Maidique, who is an only child, whistles, still delighted: ``Problem solved.''
Many years later in Miami, Maidique would do the same for another Cuban when lawyer and civic activist Rafael Peñalver was being attacked on Cuban radio for not allowing political groups to operate in the historic San Carlos Institute he had restored in Key West.
''Maidique showed up and gave me public support,'' Peñalver says. 'That took guts, going to Cuban radio and saying, `I stand by him and he is no communist.' He had to go there against the interests of a lot of powerful people, including the [Cuban American National] Foundation, to stand by my side.''
* * *
Dealing with the Cuban community has been perhaps Maidique's most difficult balancing act.
''He has had some pressure put on him by the community to stifle what we do on Cuba, and he has not exerted that in any way,'' says sociologist Lisandro Pérez, founding director of FIU's Cuban Research Institute. Yet ''some concessions to the fact we are in Miami'' were made, Pérez says. Participation in a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation program to host a humanities scholar from Cuba to study issues of national identity was kept under wraps so as not to arouse community backlash.
''A lot of stuff we do on Cuba was not something the university valued,'' Perez says. ``It was something tolerated, not valued.''
Says Maidique, a self-described ''conservative'' and registered Republican: ``I hold academic freedom as an absolute value.''
It was a value tested again as one of the biggest scandals in the school's history unfolded at FIU when Carlos M. Alvarez, an education professor, and his wife, Elsa, an FIU counselor, were indicted last January and accused of being spies for Cuba.
The charge was damaging to the university's reputation, and to Maidique, ''doubly painful.'' The couple were longtime friends of Maidique.
Maidique set out to protect the university's reputation, hiring former U.S. Attorney Roberto Martinez to investigate whether FIU policies were violated and issuing a statement to the community, asking for patience.
He also showed up at the Alvarezes' bond hearing -- a risky move that at first brought criticism but has since won praise from colleagues and faculty critics.
''It was odd, it was vintage Miami, it was Mitch Maidique showing his human side, his empathetic side,'' Rosenberg says. 'If he wouldn't have gone, people would say, `What kind of friend was he in a tough moment?' One way or another, that would have looked bad. It is still a very unhappy and unpleasant situation.'' But, Rosenberg adds, Maidique ``turned instinctively to making sure the institution was addressed and protected.''
The issue put Maidique in the spotlight again when, citing the spy case, state Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, sponsored a bill to make it impossible for state-run colleges and universities to sponsor or promote trips to Cuba, even for legitimate research.
An FIU alumnus, Rivera is a key legislator in getting funds for the university. The bill passed, and some criticized Maidique for not standing up to Rivera more strong- ly on the Cuba-ban issue.
But others with behind-the-scenes knowledge say Maidique for many years has defended academic freedom in Tallahassee and won -- only this time, he knew that Rivera had already struck a deal with other legislators and that passage of the bill was ``a done deal.''
The pressures of his job and his devotion to it, Maidique says and others close to him confirm, have adversely affected his personal life. He has a son, Mark, and a daughter, Ana, and five grandchildren.
Divorced from Eulalia, his first wife and mother of his two children before he moved to Miami, Maidique has twice divorced (New York psychologist Ana Margarita Hernández and Lea Pacheco, an FIU administrator) while president of FIU.
''The focus of my life has been the professional side,'' he says. ``I have not excelled nor have I been fortunate enough to find lasting happiness.''
In June, he married 41-year-old Nancy Aguero, a dental-health administrator he met a year ago when she came to his office with a group of graduates with 4.0 grade-point averages. It was a gathering that Maidique holds every semester, hosting an elite group from which he has hired most of his office staff.
Nancy impressed him with her poise and eloquence, Maidique says, and he later called and asked her out. They dated for a year and honeymooned in Europe this summer.
Nancy, once divorced, says she doesn't mind being wife No. 4.
''So far, so good,'' she says. ``No complaints.''
Maidique vows to live ''a more balanced life'' with Nancy, but says he doesn't plan to retire soon. When he does, he adds, he wants to remain at FIU as a professor.
His daughter, 41-year-old Ana Bogusky, is a graduate of Duke, worked in advertising, and is now a stay-at-home mom in Colorado, married to Alex Bogusky, chief creative officer of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the edgy Coconut Grove ad agency.
Maidique's son Mark, 35, an architect who lives in Connecticut and is a graduate of Cornell, tells a story that he says illustrates the risk-taker his father has always been, something he admires and has tried to emulate.
His father, Mark says, didn't have a date for the school dance, but he did have a crush on ``the most beautiful woman in school.''
'So he says, `What the heck, I might as well ask her, might as well take a shot at it.' It turned out that nobody had asked her because she was so beautiful that everyone was intimidated.''
And so Maidique took the most beautiful girl in school to the dance.
For Maidique, a more memorable moment came later when he was a 40-something professor at Harvard and his mother came back from the dentist with this tale:
Upon seeing her name, the dentist remarked, ``Are you related to Modesto Maidique?''
''Yes,'' she said, ``I am the senator's widow.''
''What senator?'' the dentist said. ``I'm talking about the Harvard professor.''
Maidique says he told his mother that day: ``Looks like I finally equaled my father.''
''Son,'' she replied, ``you exceeded him a long time ago.''
www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/15473205.htm
Both criticism and praise for Maidique
New buildings and professional programs, more students: FIU's president achieves a lot -- but praise isn't always unanimous.
By FABIOLA SANTIAGO
fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com
On a scorching summer morning, Mitch Maidique neatly folds his navy blue jacket in the back seat of a golf cart, hops in behind the wheel, and deftly steers it out of his Italian villa-style presidential home at Florida International University's West Miami-Dade campus.
He drives past a cluster of buildings in hues of Mediterranean terra cotta, then stops at the College of Architecture and the Arts, designed by a prominent New York architect and awash in bright red and yellow.
''My pride and joy,'' Maidique calls it.
Then, it's off to the new law school under construction, where the interior courtyard was inspired by the symmetry of Rome's Cloister of St. Giovanni in Laterano, Maidique says. He also notes that he walked St. Peter's Square in Rome -- the periphery of all 300,000 square feet of it -- ''and measured it'' to ensure that FIU's main entrance on Southwest Eighth Street and 112th Avenue, with the colonnades at each side, ''would embrace you, have the same welcoming feel'' as at the Vatican.
To outsiders, Maidique's enthusiasm may come off as hyperbole. But to Modesto ''Mitch'' Maidique, celebrating his 20th anniversary as president of FIU, the grandeur is serious business. More than metaphor, it stands for the high standards Maidique set for himself and for the fledgling commuter university when he became its fourth president on Oct. 12, 1986.
''I deeply believe that FIU is destined to become one of the world's great universities,'' he said after being named.
It was a different Miami then, divided over the rise to power of Cuban Americans, and his appointment generated concerns about FIU becoming ''a Cuban university'' and about the former Stanford University professor and wealthy entrepreneur with no experience in university administration.
Maidique inherited a university that had experienced tremendous growth and academic achievement since it opened on an old airfield off Southwest Eighth Street in 1972 with 5,667 students, the largest opening-day enrollment in U.S. college history. The engineering program was on its way to becoming an engineering school. The hospitality program had earned a national reputation.
''What I found was a nascent university with a committed faculty, determined to make something out of this place,'' Maidique says.
Today, world-class status doesn't seem such a far-fetched goal as FIU basks in unprecedented growth: an architecture school, a law school, a performing arts center, a museum and spectacular art collections, Division I-A football, multimillion-dollar research grants and, this year, the approval of a medical school, set to open in the fall of 2008.
Five buildings are under construction at a cost of $140 million at the University Park and Biscayne Bay campuses. Research grants total $80 million, enough to land FIU the second-highest ranking in the Carnegie Foundation's classification system of research universities, but not enough to catapult FIU into the league of older institutions like the University of Florida's $494 million in research grants.
There's a record-breaking enrollment of 38,500 students, more than double the number 20 years ago. The university continues to draw most of its students from South Florida although a growing number are coming from elsewhere in the state and nation. Admission standards have risen slightly for undergraduates, as have SAT scores and grade point averages, but Maidique says he wants the university to remain accessible. The law school, however, has a stricter acceptance rate as 2,000 applicants competed for 110 spots this fall.
Driving it all is 66-year-old Maidique -- engineer by training but architect at heart, demanding boss, suave Latin dancer, newlywed for the fourth time (to Nancy Aguero, an FIU graduate who had a perfect 4.0 grade-point average), a long-distance grandpa who doesn't hesitate to drop to the floor to play.
But most of all, Maidique is the university's best salesman who exults that ``great things are happening at FIU and you want to be a part of it.''
His request for next year, from a mix of public and private sources: $45 million for capital improvements.
''He's not an incremental thinker,'' says David R. Parker, chief operating officer of The Archstone Partnerships, a New York hedge fund, and chairman of the 13-member FIU board of trustees. ``He is a strategic thinker and is not afraid of the big thought. What he has created through his leadership is a tremendous asset to this community.''
Many in higher education affirm that Maidique's vision was timely and in line with what Miami also was becoming -- international, distinguished in the arts and architecture.
''He came in, he had a vision, he pursued the vision, he was persistent, determined,'' says Mark Rosenberg, who is now chancellor of the state university system and who, under Maidique, was FIU provost for seven years. ``Vision is the art of seeing the impossible. Mitch saw the impossible and made it the inevitable. That is leadership.''
Says Chief Financial Officer Vivian A. Sánchez, lured to FIU by Maidique two years ago from the echelons of international banking: ``He's an entrepreneur, and the entrepreneur always wants to do more. You become enthralled with the possibilities.''
Fiercely competitive, Maidique is not shy about trumpeting his role in FIU's growth.
''How many university presidents can claim an architecture school, a law school and a medical school under their leadership?'' he recently asked a group of student government leaders.
Nobody knows.
''Two,'' Maidique says.
''And do you know who the other is?'' he asks.
No right answers.
''Thomas Jefferson!'' Maidique says, referring to the third U.S. president's role in designing the University of Virginia campus in Charlottesville.
''And I am giving him credit for a design and arts school,'' he adds.
Everyone laughs.
''When he says things like that, [it shows] he has a great sense of humor and he [acts] 20 years younger than he is,'' says student Alex Prado, 22.
Some alumni and staff members agree.
''FIU is the house that Maidique built,'' says José W. Pérez, an independent art curator who graduated from FIU in 1978 with a bachelor's degree in fine arts. ``It was his perseverance that has made FIU what it is.''
* * *
But praise is not unanimous. Some see Maidique as an imperial leader who doesn't consult the faculty and students on key issues.
Shortly after assuming the presidency in 1986, Maidique set aside the school symbol -- the Sunblazer -- and unveiled the Golden Panther, sparking a controversy because he didn't consult students and faculty.
''What is a Sunblazer?'' he challenged.
He also angered many across the state when he proposed to change FIU's name to the University of Florida at Miami, and years later when he launched a football program without consulting the faculty.
Parker, who as a trustee is one of Maidique's bosses, says the naysayers misread Maidique.
''He is persuasive, but he listens to people,'' Parker says. ``Sometimes he might give an impression that he doesn't, but he does. He has such a challenging intellect that people think he is a little imperial from time to time. But if that is what I get with the package, so be it. I'll take a little imperial.''
The board of trustees signed a three-year contract with Maidique in June, paying him $542,608 the first year, including an $80,000 bonus. Parker says the board hired a law and accounting firm to evaluate Maidique's compensation. ''It's a fine salary because he is one of the best in the nation, he has been at the university for 20 years with an important list of accomplishments, and he consistently demonstrates high levels of energy and enthusiasm,'' Parker says.
Maidique's energy is often on display.
Throughout a tour of the campus, Maidique invokes grand images of Europe that he says have influenced the architectural enhancements at FIU -- the Palais-Royal and Parc de la Villette in Paris. The chief designer of the pyramid project at the Louvre, Yann Weymouth, is the architect of FIU's Patricia and Phillip Frost Art Museum, he notes.
''This is my law school,'' he says, pulling into the construction site and explaining that one of New York's foremost architects, Robert A.M. Stern, designed it.
Maidique is equally proud of the sports program. When he runs into sophomore Alex Galindo, who the night before scored a record-setting 39 points in a basketball game, Maidique is as star-struck as a teenage girl meeting a rock idol.
He struts up to Galindo, shakes his hand, pats his back, and at machine-gun speed, recaps Galindo's performance.
* * *
''The only thing modest about Modesto is his name,'' jokes Miami architect Raúl Rodríguez, who designed FIU's $2.5 million, 9,000-square-foot University House, where Maidique lives at the entrance to the University Park campus in West Miami-Dade.
The extravagance of Maidique's style, to some an effective sales pitch, also has gotten him in trouble.
A Miami Herald review of his expenses earlier this year found that Maidique sometimes traveled first-class, booked limousine rides instead of taxis, and spent $516 a night for a hotel in Paris while on university business.
Maidique explains that his choices had to do more with ''efficiency'' than flash, but he returned $2,950 for ``cases in which the line between personal and university [business] was not clear.''
''I think he let himself get into minor incidents of overexpenditure because he wasn't attentive to the details of what he was doing,'' Parker says. ``But that has been fixed, attitudinally and with controls. Things happen. It was very unfortunate for him, but it is a tiny issue in the context of what he has been doing for 20 years.''
But the expenditure story followed a longer-running issue -- a labor feud with the faculty, spawned by the dissolution of the state's Board of Regents.
When the state authorized the universities' separate boards of trustees to negotiate their own contracts, the FIU faculty went without a contract for three years. That led the faculty union's president to declare ''war'' on the administration and the Faculty Senate to pass a resolution in December expressing ''grave concerns'' about Maidique's leadership.
A new contract wasn't reached until February.
''His relations with faculty are a whole lot better because we have a bargaining agreement, but we didn't have one for three years,'' says Carmela McIntire, at FIU since 1981 and chair of the English Department. ``That was very unpleasant and demoralizing for the faculty.''
Some in the faculty also worry that the rapid growth -- specifically, the additions of law, medicine and football -- has come at the expense of other programs.
''The push seemed to supercede everything else for a while,'' McIntire says. ``Cam- puswide, we just don't have enough resources. We're still underfunded per student.''
Maidique agrees with McIntire on the funding issue, but notes that it is the result of ``Florida not funding its university system in a manner consistent with the rest of the country.''
The football team, he says, is funded by student fees. The budget for construction comes from capital improvement funds that are separate from operational costs, which include per-student expenditures.
''You need the space to accommodate students, faculty and expanding programs,'' he says. ``I am looking forward to the next 20 years -- not next week.''
The faculty feels that Maidique has been ''distant from us,'' McIntire says. ``He doesn't do the day-to-day, but if there is a problem, he does pay attention.''
After she complained in a meeting that her department, housed in the second-oldest building on campus, had carpets that hadn't been changed since 1971, Maidique showed up for a two-hour visit.
Shortly afterward, the department got a makeover.
Likewise, on the campus tour, Maidique asks faculty lounge staff members and professors having lunch how they like the renovations. When they complain about buffet items being too far to reach and the hostess podium being too tall, Maidique promises to fix them.
Such attention to design is rooted in personal history. Behind the crown of university president and Maidique's four degrees in engineering from MIT is a man whose dream was to become an architect.
'Back in Cuba, they used to say, `Los arquitectos se mueren de hambre,' '' Maidique remembers. That means ``Architects die of hunger.''
* * *
Maidique grew up with a quixotic drive to succeed, fueled largely by his family's prominence in politics, education and history. His grandfather fought in the war of independence against Spain and owned extensive parts of the city of Ciego de Avila in eastern Cuba, where a neighborhood is still named ``Reparto Maidique.''
His father, Modesto, a senator in Cuba, was gunned down while leaving his lawyer's office in Havana when the son was 11 months old. Modesto Sr. had taken part in a duel with another senator in 1931 and killed him. The killing of Modesto Sr., many believe, was motivated by political rivalry.
Mitch Maidique's mother, Hilda Rodríguez Sarabia, was so distraught the family sent her to the United States to distract her. She eventually married a New Yorker, Max Finkelstein, manager of the now defunct Crawford's department store, and she took young Mitch with her to live first in New York, then in Texas.
While attending P.S. 69 in Queens, Maidique says, he learned ``the value of ethnic solidarity.''
At the public school, a group of older boys were picking on him every day and taking his cap. Looking for a solution, he came upon ``the only other Cuban in the school -- a 17-year-old giant.''
Maidique says that the 17-year-old told the younger kids: 'This is my brother, you mess with him, you are messing with me. You want to take him on? Just one. Let's do it right now, right here. All five? You got me in, so don't bug him anymore.' ''
Maidique, who is an only child, whistles, still delighted: ``Problem solved.''
Many years later in Miami, Maidique would do the same for another Cuban when lawyer and civic activist Rafael Peñalver was being attacked on Cuban radio for not allowing political groups to operate in the historic San Carlos Institute he had restored in Key West.
''Maidique showed up and gave me public support,'' Peñalver says. 'That took guts, going to Cuban radio and saying, `I stand by him and he is no communist.' He had to go there against the interests of a lot of powerful people, including the [Cuban American National] Foundation, to stand by my side.''
* * *
Dealing with the Cuban community has been perhaps Maidique's most difficult balancing act.
''He has had some pressure put on him by the community to stifle what we do on Cuba, and he has not exerted that in any way,'' says sociologist Lisandro Pérez, founding director of FIU's Cuban Research Institute. Yet ''some concessions to the fact we are in Miami'' were made, Pérez says. Participation in a prestigious Rockefeller Foundation program to host a humanities scholar from Cuba to study issues of national identity was kept under wraps so as not to arouse community backlash.
''A lot of stuff we do on Cuba was not something the university valued,'' Perez says. ``It was something tolerated, not valued.''
Says Maidique, a self-described ''conservative'' and registered Republican: ``I hold academic freedom as an absolute value.''
It was a value tested again as one of the biggest scandals in the school's history unfolded at FIU when Carlos M. Alvarez, an education professor, and his wife, Elsa, an FIU counselor, were indicted last January and accused of being spies for Cuba.
The charge was damaging to the university's reputation, and to Maidique, ''doubly painful.'' The couple were longtime friends of Maidique.
Maidique set out to protect the university's reputation, hiring former U.S. Attorney Roberto Martinez to investigate whether FIU policies were violated and issuing a statement to the community, asking for patience.
He also showed up at the Alvarezes' bond hearing -- a risky move that at first brought criticism but has since won praise from colleagues and faculty critics.
''It was odd, it was vintage Miami, it was Mitch Maidique showing his human side, his empathetic side,'' Rosenberg says. 'If he wouldn't have gone, people would say, `What kind of friend was he in a tough moment?' One way or another, that would have looked bad. It is still a very unhappy and unpleasant situation.'' But, Rosenberg adds, Maidique ``turned instinctively to making sure the institution was addressed and protected.''
The issue put Maidique in the spotlight again when, citing the spy case, state Rep. David Rivera, R-Miami, sponsored a bill to make it impossible for state-run colleges and universities to sponsor or promote trips to Cuba, even for legitimate research.
An FIU alumnus, Rivera is a key legislator in getting funds for the university. The bill passed, and some criticized Maidique for not standing up to Rivera more strong- ly on the Cuba-ban issue.
But others with behind-the-scenes knowledge say Maidique for many years has defended academic freedom in Tallahassee and won -- only this time, he knew that Rivera had already struck a deal with other legislators and that passage of the bill was ``a done deal.''
The pressures of his job and his devotion to it, Maidique says and others close to him confirm, have adversely affected his personal life. He has a son, Mark, and a daughter, Ana, and five grandchildren.
Divorced from Eulalia, his first wife and mother of his two children before he moved to Miami, Maidique has twice divorced (New York psychologist Ana Margarita Hernández and Lea Pacheco, an FIU administrator) while president of FIU.
''The focus of my life has been the professional side,'' he says. ``I have not excelled nor have I been fortunate enough to find lasting happiness.''
In June, he married 41-year-old Nancy Aguero, a dental-health administrator he met a year ago when she came to his office with a group of graduates with 4.0 grade-point averages. It was a gathering that Maidique holds every semester, hosting an elite group from which he has hired most of his office staff.
Nancy impressed him with her poise and eloquence, Maidique says, and he later called and asked her out. They dated for a year and honeymooned in Europe this summer.
Nancy, once divorced, says she doesn't mind being wife No. 4.
''So far, so good,'' she says. ``No complaints.''
Maidique vows to live ''a more balanced life'' with Nancy, but says he doesn't plan to retire soon. When he does, he adds, he wants to remain at FIU as a professor.
His daughter, 41-year-old Ana Bogusky, is a graduate of Duke, worked in advertising, and is now a stay-at-home mom in Colorado, married to Alex Bogusky, chief creative officer of Crispin Porter + Bogusky, the edgy Coconut Grove ad agency.
Maidique's son Mark, 35, an architect who lives in Connecticut and is a graduate of Cornell, tells a story that he says illustrates the risk-taker his father has always been, something he admires and has tried to emulate.
His father, Mark says, didn't have a date for the school dance, but he did have a crush on ``the most beautiful woman in school.''
'So he says, `What the heck, I might as well ask her, might as well take a shot at it.' It turned out that nobody had asked her because she was so beautiful that everyone was intimidated.''
And so Maidique took the most beautiful girl in school to the dance.
For Maidique, a more memorable moment came later when he was a 40-something professor at Harvard and his mother came back from the dentist with this tale:
Upon seeing her name, the dentist remarked, ``Are you related to Modesto Maidique?''
''Yes,'' she said, ``I am the senator's widow.''
''What senator?'' the dentist said. ``I'm talking about the Harvard professor.''
Maidique says he told his mother that day: ``Looks like I finally equaled my father.''
''Son,'' she replied, ``you exceeded him a long time ago.''
