Frank L. McVey and the University of Kentucky: A Progressive President and the Modernization of a Southern University

Series Editor's Foreword

ix If anyone opposed the nomination of Frank L. McVey as the University of Kentucky’s new president in the summer of 1917, it has gone unrecorded . The Board of Trustees, like the search committee, was unanimous in its enthusiasm. And as Eric Moyen notes in this long-awaited and meticulously researched biography, once the offer was made official, the “normally prudent” McVey accepted “with uncharacteristic haste.” At forty-seven, he was already well-known in reform circles, his impressive credentials capped most recently by a successful six-year stint as president of the University of North Dakota. But the ambitious McVey had also been scouting opportunities to leave Grand Forks for months— unfavorable changes in the state’s political climate had seen to that—and Lexington proved to be just the ticket. The selection of McVey’s predecessor, Henry Stites Barker, had an altogether different character. Contention and delay marked the proceedings from the start. James K. Patterson, the outgoing president in 1909, had served the school with distinction since its founding as an A&M college forty years earlier and was vocal in his opposition. Against those who favored the appointment, the revered but imperious patriarch insisted that Barker was unqualified. Henry S. Pritchett, the influential first president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, took the same view. And as if all this weren’t enough, Barker, a widely respected lawyer and circuit court judge from Louisville, a longtime friend to PatSeries Editor’s Foreword x SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD terson, and a prominent member of the board since 1900, had reasons of his own to be reluctant. Finally, in June 1910, after five months of public silence and some backstage maneuvering, the stalemate ended. Convinced now that any one of the other potential candidates would make for an even worse choice, Patterson reluctantly swung his support to Barker. That was enough for the judge to accept the presidency, but only on the condition that his duties be postponed until the following January when his term on the appellate bench expired. What began so inauspiciously came to a sad conclusion a few years later. In December of 1916, a special committee of the board was appointed to make a recommendation on a pending but controversial proposal to merge what were then two separate colleges—mechanical and civil engineering. However, that same committee was also charged with a more general responsibility: “to investigate . . . conditions causing or tending to produce discontent among the alumni and student body and general public toward the existing administration.” The result, a detailed report submitted to the board in early June, concluded with sixty-nine recommendations, the first of which read in part, “We are convinced that the welfare of the university and the State which it serves demand [Judge Barker’s] retirement at an early date to make way for a professional educational administrator.” Softening the blow only slightly, the report was quick to add that Barker “had been grievously sinned against in this matter,” placed in the “impossible situation of being a captain of a ship without ever having studied navigation.” The report’s second recommendation was as hard-hitting as the first. In order “to prevent the annoying and thwarting of another president as President Barker had been annoyed and thwarted,” it called for Patterson to vacate the seat on the Board of Trustees that he had continued to occupy since his retirement.1 McVey was an economist, a Yale PhD, better prepared than most to be “the captain of the ship.” By the time he retired, he had engineered or supervised most of the reforms envisioned in the report that had paved the way for his arrival twenty-three years earlier. Bureaucratic procedures were firmly in place, campus facilities had been expanded and improved, xi SERIES EDITOR’S FOREWORD and the colleges of education and agriculture now enjoyed new prominence in what had become a more highly diversified curricular environment . Academic professionalism—a commitment to graduate education and specialized research—had taken root in the ranks of a much larger faculty, and thanks in part to steady and dramatic increases in the annual number of graduates, the institution’s reputation statewide was better than ever. Moyen salutes McVey as the University of Kentucky’s founder, but he also makes it clear that it was not smooth sailing by any means. Even before the downturn brought on by the...