Charles Odegaard, 1911-1999, was UW’s steady hand for 15 remarkable years

In May of 1973, an unusual notice appeared in the pages of the Daily: "Charles Odegaard has lived through 15 years of riot, famine, pestilence, the Legislature, the faculty, budget cuts, lawsuits and swarms of uppity students. Let's do something to make it up to him," it read.

The notice was a call for students to attend a retirement party in the new “Central Plaza” (the irreverent “Red Square” was already becoming popular with everyone but administrators). The guest of honor: Charles E. Odegaard, president of the University of Washington, who was stepping down after 15 years in office.

On that day, 5,000 students joined faculty and staff in launching balloons, eating ice cream cones and applauding Odegaard for his service—a remarkable gesture in an era where some presidents were afraid to cross their campuses without a police escort.

“He couldn’t quite believe it. After all those years of student protests, all those people showed up. He just loved it,” recalls his daughter, Mary Ann Odegaard Quarton.

During his retirement party in “Red Square,” Odegaard was given a sweatshirt with a phrase that roughly translates to “The Univeristy is me.” (Photo by James Sneddon)

During the ceremonies, the ASUW president announced that the new undergraduate library had been named in Odegaard’s honor. Students also presented the President with a purple and gold sweatshirt emblazoned with a paraphrase of Louis XIV. It read “L’université c’est moi,” but Odegaard quickly dismissed the notion that he was the University. “This thing on my back just isn’t true—the University is us,” he said.

And while that is true—the University is a community of scholars, each contributing to the world of learning and knowledge—Odegaard was without a doubt the number one scholar, the master builder of what is one of the premier research universities in the nation and the world.

Of his years in office, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer wrote, “It can be said without qualification that they have been the … years in which the UW was transformed from just another good university to a great one.”

Adds President Richard L. McCormick, “Thanks to Charles Odegaard, the University of Washington is what it is today. Virtually all marks of distinction the UW achieved came during his reign. Every president who follows him will be in his debt. He showed us what was possible.”

UW President Emeritus Charles Odegaard died Nov. 14, 1999 of heart failure after several years of failing health. He was 88.

Were those 15 years, from 1958 to 1973, really an era of “riot, famine and pestilence” as the Daily so boldly declared? Actually they were a golden era in the growth of the University of Washington.

Student enrollment doubled from 16,000 to 32,000. A record-breaking building boom saw the addition of 5.5 million square feet of floor space, doubling what the UW had when Odegaard arrived.

Research grants totaled a minimal $9.8 million in 1959; when he left they were at $70 million and today stand at more than $600 million. The UW rose to become one of the top five institutions in the nation receiving federal research funding—a position it still holds today.

When Odegaard arrived, the UW had only one faculty member in the National Academy of Sciences. When he retired, there were six and today there are 40. It was during Odegaard’s tenure that UW Professors Hans Dehmelt, Edmond Fischer, Edwin Krebs and E. Donnall Thomas did most of the basic research that would later win them each a Nobel Prize.

The cover of the Daily declaring Charles Odegaard day.

This success wasn’t apparent when Odegaard left a deanship at the University of Michigan for Seattle. A Seattle Times article described the pre-Odegaard UW as a campus “grown complacent. Except for the nationwide reputation of the medical school, scholars were not exactly beating down the doors to join the faculty. Salaries were uninspiring. Construction and laboratory equipment lagged far behind the requirements for greatness.”

History Professor Emeritus Thomas Pressly says that in the 1950s, the UW suffered from cronyism. “The University really had just not had strong leadership,” he says. Adds former Gov. Albert Rosellini, ’32, ’33, “When the presidency of the UW was vacant, we on the Board of Regents decided a lot was overdue. We needed leadership.”

Leadership is what they got. Odegaard soon cleaned house, starting with the departure of the dean of arts and sciences. After six years, of the 15 deans on board when the President arrived, only three remained. He pushed through major reforms in the faculty structure and student curriculum, especially for freshmen.

He was criticized for being heavy-handed or autocratic, but the UW needed some strong medicine. “You know, some of the people he fired came up to me years later and told me they thought it was the best thing that ever happened to them,” Quarton says. “He wasn’t afraid to tackle problems. He had a vision for what he was trying to do.”

“The essence of Charles Odegaard, what made him a great president, was his vision of what a university should be. It was a teacher’s and a scholar’s vision,” Pressly says. “He would judge all events in terms of that concept. He was determined to push the University into becoming a community of scholars.”

But marching into that community was Odegaard’s biggest challenge—thousands of new students coming as a result of the post-war “baby boom.”

“He was hired to deal with that baby boom,” says historian Jane Sanders, ’71, ’76, author of Into the Second Century, The University of Washington 1961-1986. “He knew the University would never, ever be able to accommodate that many kids.”

As was typical of Odegaard, what others saw as a problem, he saw as an opportunity. For years the faculty had tried to strengthen its graduate-level teaching and research programs. “It was his vision to develop the community college system in the state to take the pressure off the UW. It would also allow the University to concentrate on graduate and upper division education,” Sanders says.

As he liked to say in what we would now call a sound bite, “No institution is a total purpose institution.”

Odegaard lobbied Olympia to lift its restrictions on building community colleges near four-year institutions. By 1961 the Legislature authorized the establishment of community colleges in King County (this fall there will be nine). Yet the UW also grew by 1,000 students a year, and Odegaard led a hiring and building frenzy to accommodate all of them.

“He managed to get more resources in every category,” Sanders explained.

But the baby boom generation brought with it an era of questioning, protest and sometimes violence. The UW was not immune. Odegaard saw the attempted firebombing of ROTC offices in Clark Hall, an occupation of his office by leaders of the Black Student Union, a boycott of the football team by its black players and the nighttime bombing of the Administration Building.

Odegaard was ahead of many of his peers in responding to the civil rights movement and the demand for access to the University. In the early ’60s, he called civil rights activists in the South “heroic.” By the end of the decade, he had created a Black Studies Program and appointed the first vice president for minority affairs. He also launched a vehicle for minorities and disadvantaged whites to attend the UW through the Educational Opportunity Program (EOP).

King County Council Member Larry Gossett, ’71, who occupied Odegaard’s offices in 1968 to demand a Black Studies Program, says, “His legacy will live on. The EOP Program he created here is the finest in the nation. Through it, he gave thousands of people, who now hold high-level positions in professions everywhere, a chance they would not otherwise have gotten.”

A high point of Odegaard’s tenure was the 1961 visit by President John F. Kennedy to celebrate the UW’s centennial. (Photo by James Sneddon)

One of the most difficult times was in May 1970. Four students at Kent State University died when the Ohio National Guard fired into a crowd protesting the invasion of Cambodia. While many campuses saw strikes, firebombings and the National Guard, Odegaard was determined to keep tensions down at the UW. His policy was to use only the UW police force—no outside police or National Guard.

In a move criticized for “giving in” to student demands, Odegaard closed the UW on May 8 as a memorial to the Kent State deaths. “There was so much pent-up emotion that there had to be some release. We had to find a way to say, ‘Yes, this is an unusual event,’ ” he later said. When two students were killed at Jackson State University in Mississippi a week later, Odegaard again closed campus for a day.

There were calls for Odegaard’s resignation. One legislator wanted to pack the Board of Regents with hostile lawmakers. But over time, Odegaard’s handling of the protests was seen as masterful.

“Odegaard led by encouraging student voices but reacted firmly when protest turned to violence. He was strongly opposed to using police forces other than the campus police and the University survived that period with its educational integrity unscathed,” says former Gov. Dan Evans, ’48, ’49.

“The fact that there were no casualties on campus during the demonstrations and turbulent times is one of the finest tributes to Charles Odegaard’s time at the UW,” adds James Ellis, ’48, who was a regent at that time.

Although at one point a protestor lunged at Odegaard as he made his way to the microphone at an anti-war rally, the President wasn’t afraid. “My father had been in World War II,” says Quarton. “I don’t think he ever felt a strong sense of personal danger.”

However, Quarton says from 1968 to the time of her father’s retirement, a state patrol officer would arrive at the President’s House every night and stay in its library until dawn. There were occasional death threats and Quarton recalls a time when she couldn’t even walk down the block to see a friend without an escort.

The President kept some souvenirs of that period in his office closet: two good-sized throwing rocks and a sturdy length of 2×2 left behind from one sit-in.

In 1972, Odegaard announced that he would retire in a year. Immediately there was speculation that the student protests had worn him down, and that budget cuts due to an economic downturn drove him from office. But Quarton says those rumors were false. “He actually wanted to retire a year earlier, but the regents convinced him to stay on for a while. He just felt it was time to turn the UW over to somebody else,” she says.

“As president, he was envied for his power, respected for his vision, disliked for his arrogance, admired for his intelligence, feared for his temper, applauded for his wit, reviled for his coldness and celebrated for his charm,” wrote one columnist in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

Quarton disputes much of that description. “Yes, he could sometimes be arrogant, but he was not cold. He made my mother and me mad sometimes,” she says. “But he had very little personal ambition. He devoted his life to trying to make things better for humanity.”

“He was just outstanding as president. You will find very few people who will disagree,” adds Pressly. “In my view he’s the greatest one we’ve had so far.”

While Charles Odegaard made history as UW President from 1958 to 1973, alumni may not know that their president—a medieval historian—was a witness to history of much of the 20th century. In his autobiography, A Pilgrimage Through Universities, just released by UW Press, he recounts watching Adolf Hitler in a Nazi parade, dodging German submarines during convoy duty in the Atlantic, and even helping set the standards the Selective Service was using to draft military-aged men.

Odegaard was born in 1911 in Chicago Heights, Ill. His paternal grandparents emigrated from Norway in 1880. The son of the president of a machine tools company, Odegaard grew up on the north side of Chicago. While neither parent had finished high school, they encouraged Odegaard’s scholastic study and had an extensive library. In his autobiography, he says this family environment “preconditioned me for history as a discipline.”

A brilliant student, Odegaard was co-valedictorian of his high school. He was also the beneficiary of 1920s-style “affirmative action.” Dartmouth decided to expand its student base from mostly Eastern prep school graduates, and he was accepted into the exclusive college. He excelled as an undergraduate and was one of six senior fellows his last year. He graduated from Dartmouth in 1932 and won a Dartmouth fellowship to study medieval history at Harvard.

“I survived the second year as a graduate student at Harvard in the depths of the Depression with the least amount of money ever. I remember that I went many days without breakfast but had a 15-cent lunch consisting of a glass of milk and a sandwich from Hazen’s [Restaurant] and a 35-cent special evening bargain at a cheap restaurant” he recalled in his autobiography.

He began his teaching career in 1937 at the University of Illinois, taking a leave of absence during World War II, where he served in the Navy and saw service in the North Atlantic, Mediterranean and Pacific theaters. “I was to have an intense exposure to men of very different skills and capacities, men from diverse and dangerous social origins and classes.” He credits this “residue of knowledge about humankind” with aiding him in future roles as dean and university president.

Convoy duty in the North Atlantic was “among the days of greatest tension, most arduous and in a sense the most heroic of my war experience,” he says.

After the war, he returned to Illinois but soon became executive director of the American Council of Learned Societies, a consortium of 24 disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. In that position, Odegaard helped draw up guidelines for student exemptions from the draft during the Korean War—exemptions that would still be in place during Vietnam. In 1952 he left the council for the University of Michigan, where he became dean of arts and sciences until leaving for Seattle six years later.

After his presidency, Odegaard floundered a bit before he found his bearings, his daughter recalls. Though he was a medieval historian, he took great interest in the intersection of science and the humanities, particularly medicine. He became a professor of higher education and biomedical history and wrote a book, Dear Doctor, on humanizing the practice of medicine.

The death of his wife, Betty, in 1980, was a blow, but Odegaard continued to serve on many civic and foundation boards and began writing his autobiography. In his later years, his memory suffered from a series of mild strokes. “My father never had Alzheimer’s, as some people assumed,” says Quarton. “He always knew his family. He just gradually began to forget names and got progressively worse.”

“People have said to me, ‘What a tragedy,’ but I don’t think so,” she continues. “My father retained his social ability to the end. He was fairly peaceful about it. I don’t think that he was unhappy at all.”

Tom Griffin is the Editor of Columns.