NATCHITOCHES – Outreach, engagement and fostering a sense of community are critical to the success of NSU’s Alumni Association in encouraging participation, volunteerism and partnerships among alumni, friends and supporters. To that end, Stewart Ewing of Monroe created an endowment to specifically support alumni events, Demons on the Road and other Alumni Association initiatives that promote connections to NSU.
“I think a strong Alumni Association can help recruit students and help provide the funding for recruiting students,” he said. “The stronger the Alumni Association, the better off the university will be from a financial standpoint. There are a lot of people out there that will give if you just ask them.”
Ewing is a member of the Long Purple Line, NSU’s alumni hall of distinction, and the NSU College of Business Hall of Fame. NSU presented Ewing with an honorary doctorate of Humane Letters in 2017. That year he also received the Kitty DeGree Lifetime Achievement Award in Business presented by the Monroe Chamber of Commerce to an individual who demonstrates exceptional leadership, civic service and professional integrity.
Ewing grew up in the Innis community on the Mississippi River in Pointe Coupee Parish where he came from a family of educators. The summer after high school graduation in 1969, he moved to Baton Rouge to attend summer classes at LSU but left to attend Northwestern with three friends from Innis, one who was the nephew of Dr. Charles “Red” Thomas, vice president of Academic Affairs. He was soon registered as a business administration major and housed in Sheib Hall, also known as The Brick Shack.
At Northwestern, Ewing liked the small classes that afforded meaningful relationships with fellow students and instructors, one being Willa Sewell in the Department of Accounting.
“Every time I finished one of her classes she said, ‘You need to take this next, Stewart,’ so I kept taking classes at her direction.” When accounting firms visited campus, Sewell encouraged Ewing to sign up for an interview, assuring him that he had enough accounting classes to qualify, with the added advantage of having taken math and computer classes. Those interviews led to his first job in the audit department at KPMG in Shreveport.
Ewing completed his bachelor’s in business at NSU in 1973. After starting out in Shreveport, he moved to Monroe and began a long, successful career in the telecommunications sector. He joined CenturyLink in 1983 and rose in the company to serve as executive vice president and chief financial officer from 1989-2017. During his 28 years as CFO, he played a significant role in CenturyLink’s acquisition strategy and was instrumental in transforming the company from a regional exchange telephone company to a worldwide technology and telecommunications company.
Among the highs and lows of business, Ewing helped develop a strategy to defeat a hostile takeover by another company in 2001 that was averted “because of relationships that we built over the years, not only with our shareholders but with other companies in the industry,” he said. “It’s good to have trustworthy friends in business.”
The timing of that hostile takeover attempt had another significant impact on Ewing.
“We had a conference that we sponsored in New York every year and that year we had booked it for Sept. 11 at the Windows on the World, so had we not had we had to cancel it because of the hostile takeover, a big part of our management team would have been at the top of the World Trade Center. I feel like God’s given me an extra 25 years, so I need to try to help other people.”
Ewing tried retirement in 2017, but he likes work too much. In 2020, he joined the board of directors of Ribbon Communications Inc., a global software leader in secure and intelligent cloud communications. He also currently serves as CFO of Intermountain Management, one of North America’s larger hotel management and development companies, and on the board of directors for Progressive Bank, serving as audit committee chair.
“My daughter said, ‘We will put in your obituary: He finally retired.’” He plans to continue to work as long as he is in good health and can devote time to be involved with his children and grandchildren and other interests.
Ewing has been active with numerous philanthropies and non-profit organizations, including the Monroe Chamber of Commerce, United Way of Northeast Louisiana, University of Louisiana at Monroe, Northwestern State, Delta Community College, Wellspring, ARCO, Northeast Louisiana Soccer Association and the Louisiana Endowment for the Humanities.
Getting involved with the Alumni Association is important for the future of the university, he said.
“If it hadn’t been for NSU, I wouldn’t have had the life I’ve been able to have,” he said. He recalled attending an auditing school where he was in a class with graduates of the Wharton School of Business, Harvard, Yale, Notre Dame and Ohio State.
“I looked around and said, ‘You know, I’m not as smart as these people, but I think I can outwork them,’ and that’s been my philosophy my whole life. You really get out of something what you put into it, from a work ethic standpoint. Part of the reason I’ve been successful is I just worked and developed relationships with a lot of people along the way.”
Information on the NSU Alumni Association is available at https://northwesternstatealumni.com.