Just after her 16th birthday, Paquita Davis-Friday walked up the driveway of her Detroit-area home to a distressing sight: Her first car, a new 1984 Ford Tempo GXP, sat partially dismantled — the distributor cap taken apart and one of the wheels missing.

It wasn’t an auto theft. It was a lesson.

“My father wanted me to be able to put it together,” recalls Davis-Friday with a laugh. “I wanted to go pick up my friends. He’s like, ‘Put the tire back on and then you can go get your friends.’” For Davis-Friday, the new dean of the Massry School of Business at UAlbany, learning practical life skills —– from typing to soldering copper pipes — was the norm growing up in her family’s household. Her father, a plumber/pipe fitter at Ford’s Dearborn plant, and her mother, who worked in social services for the State of Michigan, wanted to ensure their daughters learned to be independent.

Danielle Brown, Davis-Friday’s younger sister, whose own lesson included installing a hot water heater as a teen, confirms the family’s self-reliance ethos: “We learned how to get our hands dirty —– changing tires, plumbing, all that stuff. Don’t rely on someone else to do it, if you can do it yourself.” Practical life lessons shared by family members shaped Davis-Friday’s drive: Her legally blind grandmother, who memorized the Bible, taught her how to read, how to manage a household budget and insisted obstacles were no excuse for not achieving.

At age 11, Davis-Friday participated in many of the same activities as her peers: piano lessons, swimming, volunteering. But it was while working at her paternal grandmother’s small pharmacy that she discovered a fondness for something few, if any, of her peers did: inventory. “I just felt comfortable with the structure and order, so I knew I wanted to get a degree in accounting,” she says. With a National Merit Scholarship in hand, she attended the University of Michigan and initially earned two degrees: a BBA (accounting and finance), and a master’s in accounting (MAcc.) Internships at Deloitte and Ford introduced her to the corporate world and, in her senior year, she served as a teaching assistant in financial accounting — an experience that made a lasting impression on her.

Upon graduation, Davis-Friday, the first in her family to graduate from college, received multiple job offers from the likes of Citibank, Ford and the then Big Eight accounting firms. She accepted a full-time role with Deloitte, earned her CPA designation and practiced public accounting.

That, likely, would have been her career path, but the gratifying experience of teaching as a grad student and the pull of academia had a hold on her. With encouragement from two of her Michigan professors, Paul Danos and Eugene Imhoff, Davis-Friday left the corporate world to pursue a PhD.

Imhoff, who chaired Michigan’s accounting department during Davis-Friday’s time, says it was easy to see her promise: “She had the intelligence to do the work and she had the interest to do the work ... I was responsible, in part, for making sure that we had a good pipeline of people and she was qualified.” In 1994, Davis-Friday earned an MA in applied economics and in 1996 published her dissertation, “An inflation specification of an accounting-based valuation model with empirical evidence from Mexican accounting disclosures” and the next year she received the Outstanding International Accounting Dissertation Award from the American Accounting Association.

With expertise in executive compensation and pensions, Davis-Friday’s academic career includes stops as an assistant professor of accountancy at the University of Notre Dame’s Mendoza College of Business and Baruch College’s Zicklin School of Business where, over nearly two decades, she ascended through roles as associate professor of accountancy, executive director of graduate programs, senior associate dean and interim dean. Davis-Friday was also a visiting scholar at Columbia Business School and serves as vice chair of the advisory board for the New York City Independent Budget Office.

Davis-Friday describes her leadership style as “collaborative but decisive.” It’s a characteristic recognized by those who know her well.

A steadfast advocate of diversity and inclusion, she co-chaired the Zicklin DEI task force with the school’s namesake, Larry Zicklin, and is a member of two nonprofits whose missions promote inclusiveness: Pollyanna Inc. and the PhD Project, which encourages talented underrepresented students along their paths to earn PhDs. It’s a support network that benefited Davis-Friday as a doctoral student and remains an organization for which she has tremendous gratitude. At Zicklin, she launched the Baruch-PhD Project Research Symposium to bring 15 doctoral students to present their research to Zicklin faculty. To date more than six symposia have been held and in the most recent hiring cycle two doctoral candidates were hired in disciplines where they were typically underrepresented.

“Paquita’s determination to initiate DEI standards at the Zicklin School at Baruch made me even more proud of the college, says Larry Zicklin, former chairman of the board of investment management firm Neuberger Berman and the Baruch alum for whom the business school is named. “ More than anyone I know, she understands that DEI is a bottom-line endeavor that works to the long-term benefit of the corporation as well as the groups that directly benefit from our efforts. Paquita is very special.”