A View from the Top

An interview with Neal F. Finnegan

By Karen Feldscher

Long a prominent figure in the world of banking, Neal F. Finnegan, BA’61, H’98, has served as chairman of the Northeastern University Board of Trustees since July 1998.

Formerly the president and chief executive officer of USTrust and its parent holding company, UST Corporation, Finnegan sold his multibillion-dollar empire to Citizens Financial Group in January 2000 and now serves as the chairman of Citizens Bank of Massachusetts. A Cohasset resident, Finnegan has been a member of the Northeastern corporation since 1982 and a trustee since 1989.

Here, he talks about the university, banking, his charitable activities, and going where the wind takes him.

Describe what you’re doing these days.

Since I sold USTrust to Citizens Bank, which led to my being chair of their Boston unit, I’ve been trying to help them develop the bank. I do a lot of community service for them. Many of Citizens’ current customers are companies or organizations I have known, so I try to be facilitative. I also serve on the holding company for Citizens, the board that encompasses all the Citizens banks.

I’m currently chairing Catholic Charities. I chair the WGBH audit committee. I’m vice chairman of the Multiple Sclerosis Association. I spend a substantial amount of time on Northeastern. I also have a company called Clover Capital, which owns all or part of several companies.

And I have four children and eleven grand-children, all—happily—living in the greater Boston area.

You’ve said you are what’s known as “O.F.D.”—Originally from Dorchester. What does that label mean to you?

Everybody in [my old] neighborhood was Irish Catholic. There was no melting pot. It was also highly political—there was a lot of activity around elections. Everybody worked for the utilities, or the post office, or in civil service.

The post-Depression immigrants felt job security was paramount. Going to college was something none of our parents had done but something everybody was pointed toward.

Even as a very young person, I was always getting picked by my peers to be head of something. Probably the most important thing I did in high school was join Junior Achievement. In those days, we had real little companies, and of course I was president of mine. One was a company that made plastic earring holders. The next year, it was a woodworking company that made ornamental knickknack shelves.

When you came to Northeastern at age eighteen, you were already married with a young child. How did you make that work?

When I was going to school during the day, I was working at night. I slept when I could. We were living in an apartment in Jamaica Plain. It was hard going, and the kids kept coming. By the time I graduated, I had three kids.

I’d found myself a job at Shawmut Bank, because I needed a full-time job. And Northeastern was nice enough to let my Shawmut job—I was in the management training program—be my co-op job.

Describe your early years in banking.

There had been a long history of the Shawmut CEO being on the Northeastern board, and vice versa—[former NU presidents] Ken Ryder and Asa Knowles had both been on the Shawmut board. And Shawmut was Northeastern’s principal bank. So there were a lot of ties.

Eventually, that turned out to be helpful, because Shawmut was looking for someone to be involved with Northeastern, and there I was, the alum.
For me, going into banking [when I did] was lucky because computers came along, and I had an aptitude for them, and that provided fast success. I wound up running the systems department, and that led to a very good career in the banking business.

What’s the most challenging thing about being a banker?

It’s a risk-management challenge. You’re always wondering: Who can you lend money to? What kind of investments should you make? Will a branch location succeed? Will a capital investment in computers pay off?

At the time you went to Northeastern, if you’d been able to change one thing, what would it have been?

[Laughs] It was a little disconcerting that all my friends’ names began with F, just because that was how they organized us. Seems like most people whose names begin with F are either Irish or Jewish, so I have only Irish or Jewish friends from Northeastern.

If you could change something about present-day Northeastern, what would it be?

I’d like to have more dormitories. I think the school deserves an athletic field that’s more proximate than Brookline. And the current effort aimed at moving more of the responsibility for a co-op education into the colleges is essential to holding on to that unique brand.

I’d like to see more money available for funded chairs, because it’s through these professorships that you get the highest kind of talent and
the attendant publicity and research dollars. We need more scholarship money for students; my own million-dollar gift to the school pays full tuition for an entering freshman each year. And I’d like to see the Huntington Avenue beautification finished.

If you’d asked me this question ten years ago, I’d have had a laundry list of things to say about what Northeastern needed to be and get done. But we’ve done a lot. Many people now consider Northeastern one of the top-ten urban campuses in America, if not the best.

What is the one thing about Northeastern you hope never changes?

Northeastern was a place for serious education back in the 1960s. The students understood that education mattered, and they worked hard for it. And we had professors who matched that. I like to think that today we still attract students who are serious about the education they want and faculty who are serious about delivering it. That is who we are.

What lessons from your years in banking have you been able to use in your leadership role at Northeastern?

I chaired the [Board of Trustees] finance committee for five years, all through the crucial years [of Northeastern’s financial retooling, in the early 1990s]. I think it was helpful to the chief financial officer—Bob Culver, at the time—that I was a person who understood how to read the financial statement, how to think about changes in our investment strategies, how to think about what we were doing with the capital program.

When Northeastern experienced a 28 percent enrollment drop in fall 1990, you headed a special trustees’ committee on enrollments that worked closely with then president John Curry on the layoffs, cutbacks, and planning prompted by the income loss. Describe what that time
was like.

I entered the board at the same time the school had discovered its old model—with a high emphasis on access—though laudable, was not workable. Other institutions, primarily state-supported institutions, were serving the [market] segment Northeastern had served for a number of years.

I was asked by [then Board of Trustees] Chairman [George] Matthews to head a committee that actually wound up setting a blueprint, which in many ways we’re still on, that got nicknamed “smaller, better.” The charge was to look at what the school should do about the drop in enrollments. It turned out we wound up designing a new version of what a Northeastern education should be.

“Smaller, better” never actually meant a smaller school; it really meant a smaller freshman class. It called for a serious effort at improving retention—the program was actually intended to increase the size of the retained classes of middlers, juniors, and seniors. We weren’t shrinking the absolute size of Northeastern; we were trying to resize the school on the strength of students who had a better chance of graduating.

It called for more selectivity in the entering student class. It called for a major building program, which we have by and large done. And it called for some very severe budget-cutting.

Trusteeship is always important, but it becomes real when the organization you’re a trustee of starts to flounder. You cannot take lightly the responsibility of asking thousands of young people to trust that you will keep your promises about what their educational experience will be. And we were at a point where the question of whether we could keep our promises was on the table for the trustees.

It’s a happy-ending story, as we know. But at the time, we weren’t walking around certain that all these changes were going to work—that ten years later Northeastern would be a hot school.

What was wonderful about that time was that we had the faculty, the administration, and the trustees all aligned around this better idea. The Curry presidency deserves credit for changing the direction of Northeastern.

At the time, did you question the wisdom of the plan?

On several occasions over the years, we as a board have asked ourselves whether the amount we were spending on the plan was too much, too soon. We’ve spent ourselves well into the future. And we had to compare the risk of doing that with the risk of not bringing Northeastern up to being a fully competitive residential campus. Those are risky decisions.

Here in 2003, we can say that Northeastern is a pretty attractive school in the marketplace. That’s great. But it might not have been so great if we were sitting here with a lot of dormitories and not much interest in Northeastern.

How do you react to Northeastern’s new-found popularity?

The surge class [of 2002] included 600 more freshmen than we had anticipated. It was the example of our misunderstanding how popular we had made the school. We’re three years ahead of our goals for enrollment statistics.

The discipline is, you need to run the school at whatever the agreed-upon level is. If you’re yo-yoing around about how many co-op jobs you need, what the quality of the teaching faculty needs to be, what the classroom space is, what promises you can make about dormitories—there are so many reasons why you need to set the standard for what the entering freshman class is and hold to it. That’s paramount in how you keep your promise about what the educational experience is going to be.

What are some ways to increase alumni pride in and involvement with the school?

We have changed the perception of Northeastern University. Ultimately, more and more graduates will come out of the closet. You’ve got to get them to understand what the current Northeastern is. We need to make yesterday’s graduates feel like they went to today’s school. We’re optimistic we can slowly but surely pull these people back into a higher willingness to identify with us. And climbing in the ratings is one way you try to get them back.

Each year, our new freshmen act as ambassadors who go back and tell their friends and neighbors and high school teachers what the Northeastern experience has been for them. What these kids say in vacation periods is huge in terms of moving the university forward.

How would you characterize the leadership skills and vision Richard Freeland has brought to the Northeastern presidency?

I think he’s been a very effective president. We have made great strides in the Freeland years, and I think the president and the board work very well together. Northeastern’s been very fortunate to have Richard Freeland.

How long do you think you’ll remain chair?

Assuming that the other trustees would have me stay, in my mind the chairmanship is over when Northeastern has become a residential, research, co-op school that is in, or has every chance to make its aspiration of being in, the top one hundred. For me, that would be the completion of something.

You care a lot about the university’s history. Why is that so important to you?

One of the things we have to be careful about is that, in building this new campus, we don’t forget we have one hundred years of history. Our history contains a real commitment to practice-oriented education. And we have an amazing history of leading figures of Boston who were trustees of the school. Today’s students should know that some of the best names in the city, in their day, found the establishment of this school an important thing.

You’ve mentioned you’ve been involved with leadership and fundraising for a number of organizations—Catholic Charities, WGBH, and the Multiple Sclerosis Society, among others. Why is that work important to you?

I’m involved with Northeastern because I went there and I love the school. But all the rest I do because I believe you’re supposed to do it. You know—those to whom much is given, much is in turn expected. I have many gifts, so I try to give back.

Your name was in the news last spring because of your role as chairman of the board at Catholic Charities when it decided to accept a gift from Voice of the Faithful against the wishes of Bishop Richard Lennon [who temporarily oversaw the Boston archdiocese after Cardinal Bernard Law resigned]. Was this a tough decision for the board to make?

It was not comfortable. I met with the bishop to carry the board’s point of view. He was concerned that third-party organizations shouldn’t be raising money in the name of the church.

The position of the board of Catholic Charities was that we have always taken money from organizations willing to raise it and turn it over to us for services to the poor. We had a hard time concluding as trustees that somehow Voice of the Faithful money was in any way tainted.

I know you’re a sailing enthusiast. How did you get hooked?

At age forty, I decided I wanted to learn to sail. I took lessons on Boston Harbor. A week later, I got my certificate. I bought a sailboat. Then I nearly drowned several of my friends in my efforts to captain this sailboat.

But ultimately I mastered it. I’m up to a 56-foot sailboat; it’s my seventh boat over a twenty-five-year period. I also keep a small sailboat in Cohasset harbor. I have a powerboat I keep in Scituate harbor, and I’ve got a powerboat up in Nova Scotia, where I vacation. I sail at least a couple of thousand miles a year.

It’s a great sport. You’re out there on the wind, with nature driving.

Karen Feldscher is a senior writer.