Tate, Willis M.

In 1954 Willis McDonald Tate (1911-1989) became the fifth president of Southern Methodist University; at 43, he was the youngest person to hold that position. Tate, who replaced the highly regarded Umphrey Lee, made his own mark on the university, overseeing university growth and development, and guiding SMU through the divisive 1960s. He served as president longer than anybody else, from 1954-1971, and again from 1974-1975. Following his first departure from the presidency in 1971, he was elected as SMU’s chancellor (only the second person to be honored with that position). After serving as president again for one year, he remained as chancellor until his retirement, and was designated President Emeritus.

Tate was born in Denver, Colorado, on May 18, 1911. His family moved to San Antonio in 1928, and Tate received his early years of education in the city’s public schools. He entered SMU, and graduated with a BA in 1932, and received a MA in sociology in 1935. He later did additional graduate work at the University of Texas (although he never completed his dissertation), and also at the University of Chicago. He also received numerous honorary degrees.

During his time as a student at SMU, Tate played on the university football team from 1931-1932 as a tackle. Playing for head coach Ray Morrison, Tate was part of the team that won the Southwestern Conference championship for SMU. That year, Tate also won a place on the all-Southwest team, and received honorable mention in the all-American. He remembered his football career fondly, and later recalled his most difficult football defeat-SMU’s 20-14 loss to legendary coach Knute Rockne’s Notre Dame team.

Tate moved back to San Antonio after finishing his BA, where he taught, coached football, and worked as a principal in the Alamo Heights school district. He was appointed as a principal at only 23 years of age, and was named as an outstanding young man of the year in 1942 by the Chamber of Commerce.

By this time, the future president of SMU was married and raising a family. While a student at SMU, he met his future wife, Joel Estes; she graduated in 1932, and they were married later that year. The couple had two children, Willis, Jr., and Jo Ann.

In 1943, Tate and his family moved to Houston, where he worked as executive assistant to the Reverend Paul Quillan, pastor of the First Methodist Church. His work in Houston did not last long, however, as he was appointed assistant to the dean of students at SMU in 1945 under Dean A.C. Zumbrunnen. In 1948, he became dean of students, and just two years later, was appointed by the Board of Trustees as Vice-President in Charge of Development and Public Relations.

In 1954, SMU President Umphrey Lee, who had presided since 1939 and guided the school through the uncertain years of World War II, resigned due to health problems. Lee was appointed to the honorary position of university chancellor, and SMU began the search for a new president. Filling the place of Dr. Lee was a near-impossible task, but the Board of Trustees unanimously selected Tate as the university’s fifth president on May 6, 1954.

The choice of Dr. Tate was enthusiastically received by many at SMU, and outside the university. Although Tate was two weeks short of his 43rd birthday when the Board chose him as president, his deep connections with SMU made him an obvious candidate. As one SMU news publication said at the time, "The naming of Willis Tate as the man to succeed Dr. Lee came as no great surprise. Analytical speculation over the city and campus has held Dr. Tate in this light for years. Only the orders from Dr. Lee’s physicians speeded up what was considered to be the logical order of events." The Dallas Morning News wished Dr. Tate well at the news of his selection, commenting, "On the basis of character, service in lesser posts, and handling as acting head, ‘The News’ feels that, in selecting [Dr. Tate], the trustees have done well for SMU."

The SMU that Tate would oversee upon his official installation as president was still a young institution-only 39 years old in 1954-but one that had undergone great change in the years preceding Tate’s appointment. The university had greatly improved its physical plant during the Lee years, adding about thirty new buildings since 1946; the sizes of the faculty and student body had also increased. The great task for the incoming president was to help SMU reach full maturity and determine exactly where it stood, and what it would be known for, as an institution of higher education.

More than just efforts to build new buildings and attract more faculty and students, SMU needed to take steps to insure its financial well-being by bringing in more funding, and improving the quality of its faculty and students. If, as President Lee observed, the school had just completed one major period of its development, it was entering a second-and equally important-period. The task facing SMU, and its new president, was not only to assure its continued well-being as a church-supported institution, but to define more clearly where the school was going-what its vision for the future was.

Dr. Tate was officially inaugurated as SMU’s fifth president on May 5, 1955, one year after his nomination by the Board, at a ceremony held in McFarlin Auditorium. During the ceremony, Tate was presented with the Bible, and the mace, keys, and official seal of SMU. Outgoing President (and newly-appointed chancellor) Lee attended, as did former SMU presidents Hiram A. Boaz (1920-1922) and Charles C. Selecman (1923-1938). Notable visitors to SMU for Dr. Tate’s inauguration included US Attorney General Herbert Brownell and Texas Governor Allan Shivers; an 18-day period of university festivities preceded the ceremony.

During Dr. Tate’s nearly twenty years as SMU president, he was widely praised for his work in defending the principle of academic freedom, as well as for directing the creation of a university master plan-and upon his death in 1989, officials at SMU identified these two efforts as among President Tate’s most notable contributions. In addition, during the Tate years, faculty size at SMU more than doubled, student enrollment hit 10,000 (from about 4,400 when he took office), library holdings increased dramatically, and total university endowment went from $7 million to $50 million.

During the 1950s and 1960s, President Tate defended the ability of controversial speakers to come to SMU: John Gates (editor of the left-wing publication The Daily Worker ), in 1959, and even the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in 1966. He also argued in favor of retaining books in the library that discussed communism. If a university was intended to encourage learning and exploration of ideas, eliminating materials on a subject-however distasteful-would negate the very purpose of SMU or any other institution of higher learning.

President Tate’s dedication to intellectual inquiry (in spite of being criticized by some in Dallas) was recognized in 1965, when he received the Alexander Meiklejohn Award of the American Association of University Professors "for significant action in support of academic freedom."

Tate also fostered a greater vision for SMU by establishing committees to write a master plan for the university. By the early 1960s, SMU was approaching its 50th anniversary; although it was highly regarded locally, many thought that it needed to define its purpose for the future. Especially with the postwar rise in the number of Americans attending college-a rise that was only expected to continue through the decade-and the lack of renowned, major liberal arts universities in the south and southwest, SMU had the potential to refine its operations and rival any university in the nation. President Tate initiated the master plan process in the fall of 1961, and the final plan (released in May, 1963) spelled out a variety of recommendations including improvement of the quality of faculty and student body, establishment of more graduate programs, and raising the university’s endowment.

SMU, like many colleges and universities during the 1960s, experienced student unrest over such national problems as the Vietnam War and civil rights. President Tate, as some later recalled, had the ability to negotiate with and listen to students’ concerns-never approaching them with condescension or trying to talk over them. It was, to a great extent, due to him that SMU never experienced the violence and level of disruption that hit other campuses during the 1960s and early 1970s. As a friend of Tate’s remembered that era, "SMU did have a few restless gatherings, but [Dr. Tate] just walked in and said ‘My concerns are yours.’ He calmed everyone down, because the kids believed in him. They knew he wasn’t phony." Student anti-war demonstrations, and the integration of SMU during the same period, took place peacefully.

Dr. Tate served as president until 1971. At that time, he was appointed as university chancellor, as the Board of Trustees had wanted to divide up the steadily increasing amount of responsibility borne by the president. The office of chancellor would take on a more important role than it had when Umphrey Lee was appointed to the chancellorship upon his resignation as president in 1954. At that time, the position was largely honorary, and Lee had had no administrative duties as chancellor. Dr. Tate, however, would be responsible for raising money for the university, and would also act as a sort of public-relations official for SMU. The president would be the chief operations officer of the university, and all day-to-day decisions and administrative duties were his responsibility.

Tate took up his new role as chancellor, and served as acting president until appointment of a new president by a special committee set up by the Board of Trustees. That committee selected Dr. Paul Hardin III in April 1972, and he took office on November 16, 1972 as the sixth president of SMU. Due to deep disputes with the Board related to controversies with the SMU football program and the departure of the Southwestern Legal Foundation from the university law school, Dr. Hardin’s tenure as president was brief. Those disputes forced his departure, and he officially resigned on June 30, 1974.

Chancellor Tate thus returned to the presidency, and the Board officially renamed him as president in June, 1975, following the withdrawal of the only remaining candidate for president.

Tate reluctantly agreed to continue as president, and served for the second time in that office until the fall of 1975. The Board had continued to search for a new president, and selected Dr. James H. Zumberge, the first non-Methodist to lead SMU. Zumberge took office as SMU’s seventh president on October 1, 1975. Tate returned to the chancellorship briefly, and retired in 1976. He was then appointed President Emeritus of SMU, and retained an office on campus.

In his retirement, Tate remained active in SMU and community affairs. He attended Board meetings, and was always available to school administrators to help in whatever way he could. He continued to follow SMU’s football team, and was dismayed at the infamous scandal which hit the football program in the latter 1980s, and which resulted in the temporary breakup of the program.

Dr. Tate was active throughout his life in various church and civic organizations. Organizations he chaired included the Dallas Rotary Club, Metropolitan YMCA of Dallas, Highland Park United Methodist Church (church board), Texas Council of Churches, American Association of Colleges, and the Medical City Hospital Board. In addition, he served as a member of multiple organizations and committees; these included the Dallas Symphony, SMU Board of Governors, President Eisenhower’s National Council on Physical Fitness, and Governor Clements’ Committee on Higher Education.

Dr. Tate’s wife, Joel Estes Tate, died April 1, 1987. By that time, the Tates had been married over half a century, and had two children and three grandchildren. President Emeritus Tate married Marian Cleary in 1988.

Dr. Willis Tate died while visiting his native Colorado, on October 1, 1989.

Source:

Willis M. Tate "Biographical and Pre-SMU Presidency," Series 1 in collection.

From the guide to the Willis M. Tate papers SMU 1995. 0250 and SMU 1995. 0250x., 1939-1989, (Southern Methodist University Archives, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University)