Her colleagues described her as a warm-hearted, determined, no-nonsense woman whose presence, as the first female president of CSU East Bay, is still seen and felt on campus.

Rees died at the age of 83, on July 6, only six years after retiring from CSU East Bay. The university held a celebration of Norma Rees’ life last Thursday, where roughly 150 friends, family and coworkers gathered in the New Union to reflect on her accomplishments in the community and at the school.

As the third president of the university, she made a permanent imprint on the campus leaving traces of her legacy, through the excavation of building improvements and the push for the name change from CSU Hayward to CSU East Bay.

“She was the epitome of a truly renaissance woman,” said former Provost Frank Martino, whose relationship with Rees spanned 43 years.

“For me perhaps the most endearing aspect of this rich and varied personality was her straight forward lack of pretention,” said Martino. “She didn’t have a phony bone in her body. She spoke to chancellors in the same way as she would to a plumber.”

She was responsible for roughly $70 million in building improvements to the facilities and for the expansion to the campuses in Concord and downtown Oakland.

“My first memory of Norma was when I was hired by the university. She created a position for me in downtown Oakland to help the people of Oakland get back to school,” he said. “So I was the first employee and staff in the outreach office; from there we grew and built the downtown education center.”

Though as the campus grew, so did the push for the controversial name change to CSU East Bay in 2005, said Ron Patton, university events and communication specialist.

“I was really excited by the name change because it did reflect what we were doing,” said Patton who is a 1988 alumnus. “We were growing as a university and we were reaching out to our constituencies and it really reflected the spirit the university was  turning to.”

“There was opposition,” he said, but explained that Rees took that into account and tried her best to cater to the students despite backlash from the name change. For those who graduated within the two-year time frame of the name change, Patton said she allowed students to pick whether their degrees would say CSU Hayward or the CSU East Bay name.

Rees was a master of language; studying everything from communicative disorders to the study of language origins. As a professor of communicative disorders, she received every award she could within that field, recalled Nidhi Mahendra, associate professor and department chair of communicative disorders and sciences.

Mahendra spoke of her groundbreaking research in speech pathology. “She received every honor bestowed by our professional associations, the American Language and Hearing Association,” said Mahendra.

Her efforts stretched from the campus into the community said Jim Fay, who worked closely with Rees as the former Dean of Arts Letters and Social Sciences from 1997-99.

“She was open to innovation,” said Fay.  He described her as a go-getter and said within two years of working on the campus. With Rees’ help, he was able to start online classes, fundraising for the college, and do community outreach in the Bay Area.

“We got all three up and running during the time I was dean,” said Fay. “She was great in reaching out to a very large number of community groups. I mean if you were in the community and you didn’t want to get involved you didn’t know Norma. She was interested in reaching out to everyone. She was very good that way.”

Rees’ term started in 1990 and retired in 2006 at the ripe age of 77.

“In everything she did, Norma was incorruptible in thought and deed,” said Martino. “But she was never overly self righteous and never took herself too seriously.”