Willis M. Tate papers

A Guide to the Collection

Biographical Note

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.

Scope and Contents of the Collection

This collection contains the papers of Willis M. Tate, President of Southern Methodist University from 1954-1971, and again briefly following the resignation of President Paul Hardin in 1975. Dr. Tate also served as the university chancellor from 1971 until his retirement in 1976.

Originally, the papers in this collection were arranged in several separate collections:

• SMU 1991.0035

• SMU 1994.0208

• SMU 1994.0224

• SMU 1995.0250

These collections were all combined into one collection. They all were originally Tate’s office files and had been transferred at different times, so combining them again made sense. Most of the original methods of arrangement have been retained; the Tate correspondence, for example, was originally organized in alphabetical order, and has been done so here. In this collection, the papers are divided into 8 series. They are arranged chronologically, topically, and alphabetically, depending on the series.

Series 1 consists of biographical information on Dr. Tate and his career before his election as president of SMU. Included in this series are correspondence, news clippings, awards, writings of Dr. Tate, and other biographical/personal papers. The scope of the series covers the full length of his life, but the bulk of it is not directly related to his years as SMU president.

Series 2 contains records from his inauguration as the fifth president of SMU in 1955. Dr. Tate had been elected as the successor to President Umphrey Lee in 1954, but his official installation did not take place until the following year. Within this series are letters and telegrams sent to the new president, both at the time of his election and at the time of his inauguration, programs from the inauguration ceremony, guest registers, and news clippings from the inauguration events.

Several of the schools and departments within the university held a series of academic events in celebration of the new president, such as Businessmen’s Day and Lawyers Week; programs and materials from these activities are also included. In addition, this series holds background material on the Tate inauguration: invitations, planning papers, and material on the inaugural procession and expenses.

Series 3 includes materials from his years as president and chancellor of SMU, from the mid-1950s through the mid-1970s. These papers are organized in alphabetical order according to topic, and relate both to university and national/international events that occurred during Dr. Tate’s tenure: academic freedom, communism, student unrest in the 1960s, the Kennedy assassination, the SMU Master Plan, president’s conferences, and the selection process for his successor(s) during the 1970s.

Most of the papers in this series cover his presidency and chancellorship, but there are some from his retirement years (during which his official title was "President Emeritus"), including records from the Library Capital Campaign for the Meadows School of the Arts in the late 1980s.

Series 4 contains speeches and the materials related to the many speeches Dr. Tate gave—before, during, and after he served as SMU president. This series is almost one third of the collection. Speeches were originally kept in two separate collections (SMU 1991.0035 and SMU 95.250). Sometimes there are multiple copies of many of the same speech. Speeches were often reused to different audiences with variations. Because of the large number of speeches, they have been arranged into several subseries, based on the general topic and/or intended audience.

Within each subseries, the speeches are arranged in chronological order. Users should note that some of the speeches do not fit strictly into one subseries; Dr. Tate, for example, may have given a speech on education before a church group. In addition, many of the topics he covered in his speeches were used multiple times, and some of the folder headings indicate the speeches that were used more than once. The dates for some of the speeches could not be determined; those that are undated are placed either in the back of each subseries, or in the final "Miscellaneous" subseries if they do not fit into any of the others.

Users should further note that many of the original folders that contained these speeches had dates, locations, and other relevant information written on them; these folders have been retained and can be found inside the new folders. This series specifically contains speech texts, event programs, and notes Dr. Tate kept when composing his remarks; users should note that this subseries does NOT contain any audiovisual recordings of his speeches.

Series 5 holds both incoming and outgoing correspondence on Dr. Tate. The letters in this series are arranged in alphabetical order according to the last name of the person sending the letters or the person the letters directly relate to. Some of the correspondence is topical instead of personal (such as letters of recommendation sent by Dr. Tate), and is also arranged in alphabetical order.

Series 6 contains Dr. Tate’s daily appointment books during a forty-year period. Most of these are soft cover, leather-bound appointment books with the year and his name on the front. These books cover the years 1946-1988 (except 1947; no appointment book for this year was in the collection when SMU Archives received it).

Series 7 includes papers relating to groups and committees that Dr. Tate was a part of that did not directly pertain to his activities as president of SMU. These ranged from civic organizations such as the Rotary and Salesmanship Clubs of Dallas, to educational committees such as the Governor’s Committee on Education Beyond the High School during the 1960s, and the West Point Special Commission, set up in the 1970s to address a cheating scandal at the school, of which Dr. Tate was a commission member.

Series 8 includes transcripts of interviews of Dr. Tate: one-on-one interviews apparently done for research purposes, television interviews, and interviews that appeared in print; the dates for these range from the late 1950s through the 1ate 1980s, although most of the material in this series dates from the early to mid-1970s. Users should note that the material in this series is not audiovisual; all of it is interview transcripts.

Restrictions

Access to Collection:

Collection is open for research use.

Publication Rights:

Permission to publish materials must be obtained from the Director of the DeGolyer Library.

Copyright Statement:

It is the responsibility of the user to obtain copyright authorization.

Related Material

Administrative Information

Preferred Citation

Willis M. Tate papers, Southern Methodist University Archives, DeGolyer Library, Southern Methodist University.

Acquisition Information

• SMU 1991.0035; July 30, 1991—Gift

• SMU 1994.0208; February 8, 1994—Gift

• SMU 1994.0224; June 15, 1994—Gift

• SMU 1995.0250; June 23, 1995—Gift

(The material in this collection was originally contained in several separate collections that were donated to the DeGolyer Library at different times. These collections were combined into the present Willis M. Tate papers in the summer of 2008.)

Processing Information

Originally, the Willis Tate papers were arranged in several separate collections:

• SMU 1991.0035

• SMU 1994.0208

• SMU 1994.0224

• SMU 1995.0250

In the summer of 2008, these collections were all combined into one collection. Tate’s office files had been transferred at different times and had been accessioned by different archivists after Tate’s retirement. The University Archivist made a decision to recombine the office files to recreate a single accession.

Most of original methods of arrangement have been retained. The Tate correspondence, for example, was originally organized in alphabetical order, and has been done so here.

If original order was changed, it was done in working with the speeches file. There were a vast number of duplicate speeches, filed by both date and by organization.

Paul Santa Cruz processed the collection under the supervision of Joan Gosnell.

Finding aid written by

Paul H. Santa Cruz, 2008.

Encoded by

Lara Corazalla, 2009.

Detailed Description of the Collection