Shareholders of Bank of America may have stripped Ken Lewis of his title as chairman, but the man elected to assume oversight of one of the nation’s largest commercial banks is a past supporter who some believe is likely to side with Lewis on key decisions.
The ascension of Morehouse President Emeritus Walter E. Massey to chairman came as Lewis’ responsibilities were reduced in a close shareholders’ vote. The proposal to separate the CEO and chairman jobs passed 50.3 percent to 49.7 percent, bank officials said.
BofA’s directors then elected the 71-year-old Massey chairman.
Massey trained as a physicist and mathematician, rather than a banker, but he shares elements of Lewis’ biography as a small-town Mississippian catapulted onto the national stage.
Walter E. Massey
The African-American administrator and educator was born in Hattiesburg; Lewis, 62, in Meridian. He received his bachelor’s degree in physics and math from Morehouse College in Atlanta; Lewis graduated with a finance degree from Georgia State University.
Massey is also a longtime BofA director. He has been on the board since 1998 and is a member of its Audit Committee. Before that, he was a director of BankAmerica Corporation from 1993 to 1998.
“We are disappointed the bank did not consider a candidate outside the existing directors,” said shareholder Jon Finger, who had campaigned for the CEO-chairman split. Mr. Finger’s family owns more than 1.1 million Bank of America shares.
Others, however, pointed to Massey’s history as a tough-minded overseer who has managed complex organizations from research laboratories to universities.
“President Massey will provide strategic leadership, sound judgment and integrity for one of America’s great financial institutions,” Morehouse’s current president Robert Franklin told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.
Lewis, meanwhile, acknowledged shareholders’ frustration over the company’s hastily-arranged $50 billion acquisition of Merrill Lynch and Co. last year.
“Our company’s shareholders have carried a heavy burden recently,” he said in a statement released by the bank. “We are doing everything within our power every day to fight through today’s adversity and drive toward tomorrow’s promise.”
Massey has been a director of several large companies besides Bank of America. He is currently a director of McDonald’s and has served on the boards of Delta Air Lines, Motorola and BP PLC.
In the early 1990s, he was appointed by President George H.W. Bush to head the National Science Foundation, an organization that led the government’s support of research and education in mathematics, science and engineering.
He then served in the No.2 administrator job at the University of California before being chosen president of Morehouse. Among his duties as provost and senior vice president was oversight of three labs that the university manages for the Department of Energy: Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, the Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Massey returned to Morehouse in August 1995 where he served as president until June 2007.
He has also served as a director of the Argonne National Laboratory, a vice president for research at the University of Chicago and as founding Chair of the University of Chicago Development Corp.
More recently, he was a member of the Gates Millennium Scholars Advisory Council and the National Commission on Mathematics and Science Teaching for the 21st Century.
Massey and his wife, Shirley, have two sons and three grandchildren.
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