PEOPLE WHO SHAPED TURLOCK
The lakes at Stanislaus State make an easy place to pause. They also carry the story of Marvalene Hughes: a university president who helped reshape the Turlock campus, then moved to New Orleans and faced Hurricane Katrina just weeks into her next presidency.
Hughes led Stanislaus State from 1994 to 2005, becoming its first woman and first African American president. When she died on January 3, 2026, at 88, the university remembered its longest-serving president through buildings and water features, but also through conversations students and colleagues had never forgotten. Read Stanislaus State’s remembrance.
Updated 2026.
A counselor’s career before a president’s office
Hughes was born February 11, 1937, in Eutaw, Alabama, and grew up on her family’s Greene County farm, one of nine children. Her family’s obituary places that upbringing at the beginning of a career that took her across the country.
She earned degrees at Tuskegee in 1960 and 1961 and later a doctorate at Florida State. Tuskegee’s 2026 tribute to its alumna identifies her as the first African American to earn a Ph.D. at Florida State in counseling and administration.
Her earlier work included school counseling, directing education at the first Job Corps Center for Women, and university counseling and student-development roles. The American College Personnel Association’s career history records fourteen years at San Diego State, where her responsibilities included teaching counselor education and directing counseling services.
More than a pretty campus
Under Hughes, enrollment grew to more than 7,800, and the Turlock campus added $135 million in buildings and facilities. The university’s archival description of her presidency records new academic programs, business-school accreditation and the Stockton Center’s move to a permanent home.
Campus housing also expanded. The university’s dated campus history records Residential Life Village Phase II opening in 1996 and Phase III, with an adjoining dining facility, in 2004. The permanent Stockton location extended the university’s reach beyond Turlock.
The water features have a practical side that a visitor might miss. The university’s 2017 reflecting-pond dedication announcement describes four lakes added during her presidency. Together with the older reflecting pond, they form a twelve-million-gallon landscape water-management system. It connects the familiar campus scenery with flood control, water recycling and building climate control.
The reflecting pond was dedicated to Hughes in September 2017. The Journal covered the ceremony; poet Nikki Giovanni wrote a poem for the occasion, according to the university announcement.
The president people met over lunch
Stanislaus State’s February 2026 collection of memories contains a wonderfully ordinary encounter. During her first week, marketing professor Al Petrosky walked toward a faculty orientation with a woman he assumed was another teacher. When he asked what she taught, he learned that his walking companion was the new president.
Alumna Adrian Harrell remembered informal meetings at Mom’s, the dining spot now called Warrior Grill. Former provost David Dauwalder recalled Hughes opening her home to student leaders. Those accounts show the same administrator in settings less formal than a podium or board meeting.
Earlier, as ACPA’s president in 1987–88, she had led the association’s decision to move its convention from Phoenix to Miami in response to the Arizona governor’s positions on race, gender and sexual orientation. The association’s history records that decision alongside her work on diversity and leadership development. Her later emphasis on welcoming students had a history well before she arrived in Turlock.
From building in Turlock to rebuilding in New Orleans
Hughes began at Dillard University on July 1, 2005. When Katrina threatened New Orleans, she arranged transportation to Shreveport for students. After the storm, she negotiated space at the Hilton New Orleans Riverside so the university could continue teaching and operating while its campus recovered. Dillard’s remembrance recounts the evacuation and the improvised return to instruction.
The university reports more than $400 million in physical damage and business-interruption losses. Hughes’s presidency continued through June 2011 and included rebuilding, major fundraising and new facilities. The scale of the emergency was different from her work at Stanislaus State, but both presidencies involved making a campus capable of serving its students.
She also helped others prepare to lead. The American Association of State Colleges and Universities remembers her as a founder of its Millennium Leadership Initiative, a program for aspiring higher-education leaders.
For places to start on campus, see the Turlock Guide. Read about another educator whose name is part of Turlock’s landscape, Sandra Tovar Medeiros, or return to the history of Turlock.
