For Agnes, despite some relegating women to minor roles, she fervently believes in what women can do to help the commonwealth extricate itself from the rut.
She has been through a lot as a woman, especially during her time when men dominated the political landscape of her time.
As the first president of the Northern Marianas College, and being a woman in a position that some claimed should have been held by men, Agnes says it was difficult. But she says she had to persevere and prove her worth.
“They are not used to seeing a woman in that position,” says Agnes.
She tells how she experienced discrimination on account of her gender.
During her time in the Trust Territory government days, when they were resolving a problem, Agnes remembers, “I would say certain things.
Somehow the guy next to me heard what I said and repeated what I said verbatim. Then they would look at him and tell him, ‘That is one of the best ideas we have ever heard.’”
There was a time when she had to visit the outer islands.
“I wouldn’t be permitted in the men’s house. So I told the chiefs, ‘Then we would not have a meeting.’” She says the chiefs then made an exemption for her to join them at the men’s house to proceed with the meeting.
She also tells this reporter how the men during her time treats women as a sex object and how she confronted this on many occasions.
“You have to be very strong to know how to say ‘no’ without offending people. That’s an art I learned through so many years of experience,” says Agnes.
Moreover, as president of the college and when she and a male assistant would receive guests, Agnes says she recalls the guests addressing her male assistant thinking that she was the secretary.
If she were not strong, if she didn’t believe in what she is capable of doing, Agnes would not have accomplished the things she did.
It took someone with Agnes’ courage and commitment to push for the establishment of the college.
When she left the Board of Education, the governor asked Agnes what she wanted to do and she said, “I want to become the president of the college.”
At that time, Agnes says, there was a move to have the idea of a college nipped in the bud.
But the governor then issued an executive order establishing the college with Keith Porter as the bilingual coordinator.
“We didn’t have a campus—we didn’t have anything,” remembers Agnes.
So she told the governor she would like to become the president of the college and she says this statement had taken the governor aback.
She tells how the college started with seven people using the Marianas High School classroom in the afternoon.
While doing this, they had to look for a more permanent home and finally they struck a deal with the Commissioner Janet McCoy to allow NMC to take over the buildings to be vacated by the nursing school when it moved to the Marshalls.
The three wings of the Dr. Torres Hospital that belonged to the Trust Territory government became the NMC’s first building.
“We didn’t have any equipment. What I did was I arranged a memorandum of agreement to borrow their equipment until we had the money to purchase our own equipment. That is how we started refurbishing our campus,” she says.
Agnes, who was in early 40s at the time, married with two children, would be spending most of her time at work.
“Sometimes I wouldn’t see daylight. I would go to the college, sometimes very early in the morning at 4 a.m. and leave around 8 p.m.,” says Agnes.
The college was her life.
But she had to be make the sacrifices in order for the college to get the equipment, the funding, the staff and faculty, and the accreditation that it needed.
“When you don’t have anything—you don’t have money, you don’t have staff, you have to be very creative,” she tells this reporter.
She says her strong point is knowing federal grants —knowing sources of funding.
“That helped a lot in the funding of the college,” she says.
She adds how she searched for staff. She would visit offices and talked to people and found out some who were dissatisfied with their jobs and offered them a place at the college.
She says these people moved to the college bringing with them their FTE status and salary resulting from Agnes requesting the governor to allow them to do so.
She labored hard for the college to earn the accreditation.
“We were working with University of Guam and GCC to bring their credit over here. So we were like the coordinating agency for higher education at that time. It was just a paper college.”
To gain the accreditation, legislation was needed to separate the Board of Education and Board of Higher Education which were one at the time.
Agnes acknowledges how Felicidad Ogumoro was involved in the first legislation.
Soon, they gained two years candidacy.
Agnes says she was thankful for the windfall of federal grants they received at the college.
She tells Variety how they managed to obtain the land grant status, the struggle over the condemned hospital building with the Director of the Public Health with Typhoon Kim as a way for divine providence to intervene destroying the roofs of the majority of the buildings with the Health department abandoning them.
Agnes says she struck a deal with the FEMA and worked out an arrangement with the buildings which soon became the NMC’s.
The students of the vocational class helped rebuild the facility with faculty, staff and community members helping repaint the first campus.
“The campus wasn’t yet ours. We worked with MPLC and the governor. In six years, the land was deeded to the campus.”
For 18 years, Agnes cared for the college like it was her own child.
Asked why she had to leave, “Actually I had a goal. My goal was to build the college, to have a very strong accreditation, to have a four-year degree in education, to bring land grant status—I fulfilled every one of them,” she says.
But she says the only thing missing was “I didn’t not stay long enough to see the four-year degree implemented.”
Despite what she says was dissension at that time, and the negative publicities, “to me that doesn’t matter. What matters was I left a good institution—a really strong institution.”
Asked on what the college needs, she says frankly, “You need a strong leader, qualified leaders. You need qualified people who assist the leader; a qualified CEO and an honest CEO; a person who is not seeking for himself but for the development of the institution.”
For Agnes, credentials are not enough.
“You have to know how to work with the people.” She believes it is always an uphill battle to work with different types of people.
“You have a faculty. The faculty is a different type of people. You have to deal with them with care and attention. They are the true backbone of the college. You have to recognize that they are the brain of the college. Without the faculty, you don’t have a college,” she says.
For Agnes, running a college is a “careful balancing act”—one has to have knowledge about different levels of governance.
For the young women of the CNMI, Agnes advises for them to love themselves and be strong. “They will have to have a very healthy self-esteem.
Nobody can put them down.”
She also says for them to pursue their highest dream.
“Every woman here has a place in this commonwealth and has to seek the highest potential. This island is going to be changed, not by men, but by the women,” says Agnes.
For the former NMC president, the women are a silent power in the commonwealth with a lot of leadership potential.
She adds, “They will bring the CNMI out of the crisis.”
