IN MEMORIAM
OTIS ARNOLD SINGLETARY
Otis Arnold Singletary, retired president of
the University of Kentucky, died September 20, 2003, at his
home in Lexington. He began his professional career at The University
of Texas at Austin in 1954 but left in 1961, after a whirlwind
start, to become chancellor of the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro. In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson chose him
to
create the Job Corps as part of the "War on Poverty." In
1966, he became vice president of the American Council on
Education. He returned to Austin in 1968 as Executive Vice
Chancellor
for Academic Affairs in The University of Texas System. Esteemed
highly by both Chancellor Ransom and by the redoubtable regent,
Frank Erwin, he appeared to many as a likely successor to
Ransom as chancellor of The University of Texas System. He
chose,
however,
to accept appointment in 1969 as president of the University
of Kentucky. He retired from that office after eighteen years
of widely admired service in 1987.
Otis Arnold Singletary spent his early life in Mississippi. He was
born in Gulfport on October 31, 1921. His father, for whom he was
named, did blue collar work for an oil company. His mother was Mae
Walker Singletary. After some time at Perkinston Junior College,
he moved on to Millsaps College in Jackson where he was a Phi Beta
Kappa student. There he met and, in 1944, married Gloria Walton,
daughter of the Reverend and Mrs. Robert L. Walton of Pascagula.
Service in the U.S. Navy during World War II interrupted his college
career from 1943 to 1946. He graduated from Millsaps in 1947.
Retaining his tie to the navy as a reserve officer, Otis began his
professional training in history at Louisiana State University. He
earned a M.A. degree in 1949 and a doctorate in 1954. He did much
of the reading for his doctorate while at sea serving with the U.S.
Navy again from 1951 to 1954, during and after the Korean War. In
that same period he taught at both the Navy Supply Corps School in
Bayonne, New Jersey, and at Princeton's Naval ROTC Unit. He remained
an officer in the naval reserve for many years, retiring as a Commander.
His association with UT Austin began auspiciously. At the end of
his first academic year (1954-55) he won an award for excellence
in teaching. That same year his dissertation won the Moncado Book
Fund award of the American Military Institute, publisher of the journal,
Military Affairs. In 1957, The University of Texas Press published
his dissertation as The Negro Militia in Reconstruction. He also
won promotion to the rank of assistant professor. At the same time
he began his administrative career as associate dean of arts and
sciences. In 1958, he won the prestigious Scarbrough Teaching Excellence
Award. (Senior Vice President Shirley Bird Perry was among the group
of his students who nominated him for that award.) The next year
he won promotion to associate professor and received tenure. His
outstanding record in the classroom continued as he won teaching
awards in both 1959 and 1960. His course on military history was
particularly popular. In 1960, he published his second book, The
Mexican War, a volume in the University of Chicago series on the
History of American Civilization. It won an appreciative review in
the New York Times (May 14, 1960). In the same year he became a full
professor and assistant to President Harry Ransom. However, in 1961,
he left to become chancellor of the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro. He did so despite his rapid rise (from instructor
to professor in six years), despite high praise from President Ransom,
and despite rumors that he might become president of the University
(American Statesman, April 18, 1961).
In those early years in Austin, Otis was a great admirer of Walter
Prescott Webb, then and still one of the greatest thinkers ever to
be associated with the Department of History. In what many construed
as a reckless act for a still untenured member of the faculty, Otis
invested a great amount of time in auditing one of Webb's courses.
He also travelled with Webb to a professional meeting. He returned
quoting appreciatively somewhat earthy similes which Webb had picked
up, perhaps invented, during his rural Texas boyhood. A good writer
as well as speaker himself, Otis always appreciated felicitous expressions.
If they were witty, as his often were, his admiration doubled.
Recognition as a professional historian was also coming to Otis
in those early years. His dissertation had won the American Military
Institute prize mentioned above. Reviewing the book based on
it for
the Journal of Southern History, Robert H. Woody of Duke endorsed
fully the conclusion that the Negro militia served primarily
as a "political
instrument" for the party in power. Brainerd Dyer of UCLA, in
reviewing The Mexican War, for the same journal found its treatment
of civil-military relations both "fresh and stimulating." The
American Historical Association, the premier professional organization
in the field, chose Otis to write the essay, The South in
American History, for its highly regarded series of historiographical
essays on various aspects of American history. This essay appeared
in
1957 and in a second edition in 1965.
Reflecting his Mississippi background, Otis always identified
strongly with the South. In reviewing An Epitaph for
Dixie by
Harry Ashmore,
a liberal Southern journalist, Otis noted, quite aptly as subsequent
years have proved, that Ashmore was "burying a corpse which
is still very much alive" (American Statesman, Feb. 2, 1958).
Annual meetings of the Southern Historical Association (SHA)
always appealed greatly to Otis, at least in his younger days.
Many young
academics find such meetings a bore, but for Otis SHA was different.
He loved the history of the South, but the appeal of annual SHA
meetings had social as well as intellectual and emotional aspects.
Otis loved
to get together with informed and witty people such as T. Harry
Williams and Frank Vandiver for free-flowing, uninhibited conversations
on
topics of mutual interest. Also, Otis always insisted that per
capita consumption of alcohol was far greater at meetings of
the SHA than
at other meetings of professional historians. He did his part
to uphold that reputation.
After only three years as head of the University of North Carolina
at Greensboro, Otis took a leave of absence to begin President
Johnson's Job Corps. Its aim was to help young people who lived
in "debilitating
poverty.…" It would do so by taking them out of their
deprived environments, relocating them to more salutary circumstances,
and providing them with "educational and vocational training
needed to improve their employability." (The quotes are from
the first page of The Job Corps: A Social Experiment That
Works by
Sar A. Levitan and Benjamin H. Johnson, published by Johns Hopkins
University Press in 1975.) Like other components of the "War
on Poverty," the Job Corps was quite controversial. One
critic complained that it cost more to train someone in the Job
Corps
for a year than it cost for a year at Harvard. Characteristically,
Otis
promptly offered to pay a year's expenses for any Job Corps trainee
who could win admission to Harvard. None did (Sar A. Levitan
and Garth L. Mangum, Federal Training and Work Programs in
the Sixties, Ann Arbor, 1969, p. 179).
President Johnson was quite interested in the progress of the Job
Corps. Early in his own career, he had served as a regional administrator
of Franklin Roosevelt's National Youth Administration which had a
somewhat similar mission. Consequently, Otis would on occasion receive
a phone call, sometimes a very late phone call, from the President
who had a query about the agency. Once, while a guest at the LBJ
ranch, Otis was the recipient of one of the tongue-lashings for which
LBJ was famous. He later expressed undying gratitude to Mrs. Johnson
for rescuing him, ever-so-tactfully, from the tirade.
When Otis left the American Council on Education in Washington to
return to Austin in 1968, he came sharing the expectation of many
informed people that he was the heir-apparent to his former mentor,
Chancellor Harry Ransom. Both Ransom and Regent Frank Erwin, the
two who then wielded greatest influence in the affairs of the University,
had very high regard for him. So did the man for whom Erwin was something
of a local intermediary, the President of the United States. Tending
to support the belief that Otis was chancellor-in-waiting is the
fact that the man who replaced him as Executive Vice Chancellor for
Academic Affairs, Charles A. LeMaistre, did in fact succeed Harry
Ransom. He became chancellor of The University of Texas System in
1971 after Ransom's retirement in 1970. What got in the way of these
high expectations for Otis was that he and Frank Erwin, despite their
close friendship, had very different ideas as to how to run a university.
Frank Erwin was then approaching the pinnacle of his influence in
the affairs of The University of Texas, both at the system level
and on the Austin campus. Otis left Austin and Texas, both of which
he loved, because he realized fully that whoever held even the highest
office in The University of Texas System, at that time and for some
time in the future, would be in fact a subordinate of Frank Erwin.
Privately he used a less genteel expression than subordinate and
gave that as his reason for accepting the offer to head the University
of Kentucky.
The Singletary presidency at Kentucky began less auspiciously
than had his career in Austin but ended with great respect. Student
protests against the war in Vietnam were at a high point when
Otis
assumed
office at Lexington in 1969. Fortunately, Otis had thought a
lot about such matters. Indeed, while still at the American Council
on Education, he had written a pamphlet titled "Freedom and Order
on Campus" (American Council on Education, 1968). Its thesis
was that "administrators must value justice as well as order." That
attitude apparently helped him weather some early storms, but
after Ohio national guardsmen killed four students at Kent State
in 1970,
outraged Kentucky students burned the ROTC building.
After Vietnam era protests subsided, Otis typically had a very good
rapport with students. His four teaching awards in six years at Texas
foreshadowed such a development. One story from those years reflects
the often jocular nature of his relationship with students. Ridiculing
as myth the stories of how tall Texans were, Otis asserted that without
those high-heeled cowboy boots and the high-crowned Stetsons, Texans
were no taller than anybody else. His six feet, two inch stature
seemed to reinforce his point. Far more than most administrators,
Otis enjoyed talking to students and did so often and at length.
At Kentucky, he was known also as a soft touch for students strapped
for money. He often lent them money from his own pocket. His wife,
Gloria, shared his benevolent feelings. One wintry night when Otis
was out of town, student protesters besieged their residence. Calling
their attention to the cold, Gloria invited them in for warmth and
refreshments. They accepted. When campus authorities phoned to tell
her that the protesters had gone away, she was able to tell them
where they were. The authorities were shocked; Otis was not.
Two other factors helped Otis in his relationship with students.
One was his love of sports. An avid golfer, hunter, and fisherman,
Otis loved sports in general. He was so conspicuous as a supporter
of athletics at Kentucky that he earned the nickname, "Dr. Jock." The
other factor was his good looks. In addition to all his other
attractive attributes, Otis was remarkably handsome. Had he not
chosen first
history and then administration, he had one of the major qualifications
for a successful career in Hollywood.
With the end of the war in Vietnam, Otis was able to turn more
of his attention to the matter highest on the agenda of every
university president, getting money. In Kentucky, as across the
nation, state
funding for higher education was then declining. His altogether
typical
observation on this was that he was engaged "in a conspiracy
to give Kentuckians a better university than they were willing to
support" (Lexington Herald-Leader, September 23, 2003). Testifying
that his conspiratorial efforts occasionally met with some success
are a least two significant facts. Library holdings doubled in his
administration, and the campus is dotted with buildings dating from
his tenure. Indeed, his memorial service took place in one such building,
the Singletary Center for the Arts. There one well informed memorialist
asserted that his administration had been the "most progressive
and important in this University's history" (Lexington
Herald-Leader, September 23, 2003). Its eighteen years had also been among the
longest among university presidencies, lasting three times the
average tenure
for a university president in the United States.
Surviving Otis after he lost his ten-year battle with prostate cancer
are his wife, Gloria, their three children, Bonnie, Scot, and Kendall,
as well as their respective spouses, four grandchildren, and four
great grandchildren.
<signed>
Larry R. Faulkner, President
The University of Texas at Austin
<signed>
Sue Alexander Greninger, Secretary
The General Faculty
This memorial resolution was prepared by a special committee consisting
of Professors Philip L. White (Chair), Norman D. Brown, G. Howard
Miller.
Professor White would like to thank those who provided
helpful information: Gloria Singletary, Elizabeth and H.S. ("Sonny")
Wallace, Jr., Shirley Bird Perry, William S. Livingston, Art
Dilly, Ralph L. Elder of the American History Center, and Nancy
L. DeMarcus
of the University of Kentucky Library. |
