Beverly Walker-Griffea had flown coach.

She’d booked a reasonably priced hotel, a Fairfield Inn, for $121 a night, tax included.

She’d rented a Dodge Durango for about $55 a day.

It’s not the small details of the trip Walker-Griffea took in February of 2023 while she was still the president of Mott Community College in Flint that raise questions.

It’s why the college was paying for the trip at all.

Walker-Griffea had traveled from her home in Newport News, Va., rented a car at the Detroit airport and checked into a hotel 10 miles from Mott’s campus in order to do her job as the college’s president.

According to hundreds of pages of travel receipts obtained by MLive through Freedom of Information Act requests, the college paid more than $78,000 in 2022 and 2023 for Walker-Griffea to travel back and forth from Virginia, stay in Michigan hotels and rent cars while she was in the state.

Included in that amount are per diem payments for the meals she ate when she was in the state for work, $54 each day for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

That’s on top of compensation packages that topped $400,000 in 2021-22 and fell just shy of that amount in 2022-23, placing her among the state’s best-paid community college presidents.

Walker-Griffea left Mott last summer to lead the newly created Michigan Department of Lifelong Education, Advancement and Potential, also known as MiLEAP.

But the sort of arrangement she had in her last years leading the college is basically unheard of in higher education, said James Finkelstein, an emeritus professor of public policy at George Mason University who has been studying the recruitment and employment of college presidents for more than two decades.

“I’ve never come across a situation where a president spends most of their time working remotely in any kind of university setting, whether it’s a community college, a four-year undergraduate liberal arts school or an R1 research institution,” he said. “Never heard of it anywhere.”

Indeed, Walker-Griffea’s contract required her to live within 20 miles of the college district boundary.

But Anne Figueroa, a former member of Mott’s Board of Trustees and chair of the Board in 2021 and 2022, said the arrangement made sense because the college had decided to undertake an extensive renovation of the president’s residence and because Walker-Griffea had health concerns and some of her doctors were “on the East Coast.”

“There was no decline in performance,” she said. “We communicated pretty regularly. The staff was managed. The college didn’t suffer during that transition. In fact, I think it was probably harder on her.”

The days when Walker-Griffea was working in Michigan, she said, “were 12-hour days.”

As for why the college elected to pay for Walker-Griffea to travel back and forth, Figueroa said, “I have to be honest. I don’t recall what that conversation was.”

The arrangement was apparently not well-known on campus.

Both Brian Littleton, who heads Mott’s faculty union, and his predecessor, Kim Owens, said they had not been told Walker-Griffea was traveling back and forth. Jeffrey Swanson, who was elected to Mott’s Board in 2022, said he didn’t find out about it until he’d been on the Board for close to a year.

Walker-Griffea did not reply to inquiries about the arrangement sent through MiLEAP, to a personal email address and in a letter left at her apartment. There was no answer when an MLive reporter knocked at her door Sunday afternoon.

But an official with MiLEAP, who agreed to speak only on background, said it was “a cost-saving measure” while Mott was renovating the president’s residence and that she was living in Flint again by the time she left the college in the spring of 2024.

MiLEAP is not paying for Walker-Griffea to travel back and forth to Virginia, the official said. A FOIA request for her travel receipts from MiLEAP is still outstanding.

Asked if Walker-Griffea was working remotely from out of state in her current role, the official said only that “she lives in Michigan.”

Walker-Griffea started at Mott in the summer of 2014. Her contract says that the college “requires” her “to reside within twenty (20) miles of the nearest college district boundary.”

It also gives her the option of living in a home on Second Street owned by Mott at the college’s expense, which for several years she did.

But, at the tail end of January in 2022, Walker-Griffea set off on a 736-mile drive from the Mott president’s residence to a home she’d bought in Newport News in 2007, when she worked at what was then Thomas Hampton Community College.

She flew back to Michigan two days later. Mott paid for her mileage on the drive and for the flight.

In the months that followed, she was away from Michigan more often than she was here, according to a timeline worked out by MLive from travel receipts.

Walker-Griffea appears to have spent just 128 days in Michigan in the final 11 months of 2022. She had flights on at least 43 of those 126 days.

Even when she was in Michigan, she wasn’t necessarily in Flint.

Of the 15 days she spent in the state in June of 2022, for instance, she spent four staying at the Graduate Ann Arbor hotel for a colloquium put on by a group called the Strategic Horizon Network.

She returned to the state later that month “so I can attend the Workforce Graduation, Centennial Concert, and Juneteenth festivities,” she said in an email included with the travel receipts, but, during the three-day trip, she was booked at a SpringHill Suites hotel near Detroit Metro Airport, eighty miles away from the college.

On a final three-day trip at the end of that month, she stayed in a Sheraton hotel that was also near the Detroit airport.

Something seemed to shift in 2023. Walker-Griffea began spending more time in Michigan: 102 days in the first six months of the year, though she flew on at least 25 of those days.

She also stopped booking hotels in the Detroit area and began staying consistently at a Fairfield Inn & Suites in Grand Blanc, 10 miles from the college.

The final 2023 receipts related to what the documents call Walker-Griffea’s “relocation” date to that September, though a Freedom of Information Act request to Mott for receipts from 2024 is still outstanding.

At least some of Walker-Griffea’s time away from Michigan was spent attending conferences and other meetings in locales that included New York, Toronto, Los Angeles, New Orleans and Denver. She traveled to at least six such events in 2022 and eight in 2023.

Her contract also provided her with 30 vacation days and 15 sick days each year. It’s not clear how much of her time away from the college fell into one of those categories.

Finkelstein says he’s reviewed hundreds of presidential contracts in the course of his research, he said, “and I’ve never once seen one that allows for remote work.”

Many schools require presidents to live either on campus – like University of Michigan President Santa Ono, who drew criticism for purchasing a house in Bloomfield Hills – or at least nearby.

The job of most college presidents is all-consuming and public facing, requiring both administrative acumen and the soft skills required to woo donors, forge community partnerships and communicate effectively with disparate groups of stakeholders.

“Presidents right now are agreeing that this is a 24-hour, 8-days-a-week job, and it’s difficult to do it even if you live right on campus,” said Judith Wilde, a research professor at George Mason University who also studies the employment of university presidents. “I can’t imagine doing it living away from campus.”

“The optics are really bad,” she said, particularly for a public institution in a poor community.

Mott had an $88 million budget during Walker-Griffea’s final year, just under half of which came from the state and local property taxes.

Trustee John Daly said he had serious concerns about Walker-Griffea being away from campus as often as she was.

“One of the key roles the president does is to be the representative of the college in the community,” he said, “and, from my perspective, that’s difficult to do if you’re gone a significant amount of the time.”

But Michael Freeman, who left Mott’s Board last year, said Walker-Griffea working from out of state didn’t disrupt the work of the college.

“Given she had to go through a water crisis, a pandemic and a lot of other things that were going on, I would say that the college was pretty well served,” he said.

Walker-Griffea was, among other things, named the American Association of Community Colleges’ CEO of the year in 2023.

Littleton, the union leader, said he had been unaware of Walker-Griffea’s travel back and forth, “but, if that did occur, that speaks to the need for complete transparency with our current president, our current board, about all these types of financial matters,” he said.

Walker-Griffea was already looking beyond Mott by the fall of 2023, when she was a finalist for the president’s job at Kentucky Community and Technical College. But, after months of what several trustees described as tense relations with then-Board Chair Andy Everman, she announced in April that she was retiring.

Her exit agreement provided her $300,000 in payments over two years, which Everman, who left the Board last year, said was for unused vacation and sick time and a bonus for hitting certain goals.

The agreement also included a provision that bars both Walker-Griffea and members of the Board of Trustees from disparaging one another.

At the end of May, a month after that agreement was signed and more than a month before she would officially leave the college, the state announced that Gov. Gretchen Whitmer had appointed her to be the executive director of the MiLEAP, the department created in 2023 to focus on improving learning outcomes from preschool to post-secondary education.

A spokesperson for Whitmer did not reply to an inquiry about whether the governor was aware that Walker-Griffea had been regularly working out of state.

Again, a MiLEAP official said the department had not paid for Walker-Griffea to travel back and forth to Virginia but did not directly answer a question about whether she had been working remotely from Virginia in her role as head of the agency, saying only that she lives in Michigan.

Three months of Walker-Griffea’s MiLEAP schedule obtained by MLive through a Freedom of Information Act request show more than 30 days in that period marked with designations such as “no in-person appointments,” “virtual meetings only” and “do not schedule.” In two instances, such designations were placed on five consecutive days.

Walker-Griffea does seem to have a Michigan address. She is registered to vote at an apartment in a new development in Genoa Township near Howell, less than a mile from Interstate 96.

It’s roughly midway between Lansing and Detroit Metro Airport.

Matthew Miller