The impact that Marilyn Amey made on higher education and those she taught is evidenced by the Marilyn J. Amey Scholarship Endowment Fund, created by a group of her former students at Michigan State in her honor. “They secretly contacted me to help them identify other students who might like to get involved,” recalls Amey’s husband, Dennis Brown. 

Amey ’87 MPA, ’89 PhD Edu and Brown ’89 PhD Edu both worked in higher education for many years at Michigan State and, earlier, at the University of Kansas—where Professor Amey’s students also reached out to Brown with the same goal of honoring their beloved teacher with a scholarship in her name. 

Amey was born in New Jersey and earned her undergraduate degree from Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. She and Brown met while they were doctoral students at Penn State. They were engaged at the Nittany Lion Shrine and were married in Eisenhower Chapel in 1988. The couple raised two daughters, Caitlin and Megan. “We’re a close-knit family,” Brown says. 

The bulk of Amey’s career was at Michigan State, where she was a professor and, eventually, chair of the Department of Educational Administration. She also served as the interim assistant provost for faculty and academic staff development. “She was a servant leader; her leadership was very open to bringing her colleagues and students along,” says Brown, who co-authored several papers and an academic book with Amey on higher education. The couple had a tried-and-true method of working together on a project: “We came up with an idea and split it into different parts. I would write until I was struggling, and she would come in and fix everything,” Brown says. “It worked.” 

Amey died Nov. 5, 2025, in Lansing, Mich. She is also survived by siblings Allyson White, William, Bruce, Bart, and Carolyn Nichwitz. —RR