This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, July 11, 2012 - Arnold Grobman, the former chancellor of the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has died at the age of 94, was remembered Wednesday as a visionary educator who helped the campus realize its possibilities as an urban university.
But when money got tight during his tenure in the 1980s, and he had to cut spending, his leadership wasn’t always thought of in such a positive light.
During intense opposition by many faculty members to the budget moves he said he had to make, Grobman summed up the difficulties of campus administration this way:
Your first year, he said, you may make decisions that are seen as positive by 95 percent of the people on campus. The next year, you may do the same thing, but the opponents are a different 5 percent.
By the time you have been in office for 10 years, he said, you could have half of the campus calling for your scalp, no matter what you do.
Despite such tough times, Grobman’s legacy will be his establishment of UMSL as a key part of the educational fabric of the St. Louis area, Blanche Touhill, one of his successors as chancellor, said Wednesday.
“I think his great gift to the campus was that he was a visionary,” she told the Beacon. “He was the one who convinced us that we were an urban university. Previous chancellors had talked about it, but Arnold was the one who focused on it and gave intellectual underpinning to it.”
Grobman, who was chancellor at UMSL from 1975 to 1985, began his career as a herpetologist. He was one of the first directors of the Florida Museum of Natural History, in the 1950s, before turning his attention to university administration. He held positions at Rutgers and the University of Illinois in Chicago before coming to UMSL.
When he retired as chancellor, he stayed on as a biology professor at the campus before leaving in 1988. He eventually moved back to Florida, where he died in Gainesville on Sunday.
Among his accomplishments at UMSL, Touhill said, were securing the campus’ programs in nursing and optometry.
“The campus to that time had really focused on liberal arts,” she said. “It had always offered education and business, but he believed that the citizens of the area needed more career-oriented programs. Both were very difficult programs to get, but he was able to get them.”
Touhill, who served as associate vice president for academic affairs under Grobman and later was chancellor herself from 1990 to 2002, also praised him for expanding the campus’ attention to different kinds of students.
“He talked about the non-traditional students, who worked full-time or part-time while they went to school, and because they worked, they couldn’t go away to school and couldn’t afford Saint Louis U. or Washington U.,” she said. “He believed we had a real purpose as educators to reach out, particularly to those non-traditional students.
“He also thought we had a great opportunity to reach out to women and to African-Americans in St. Louis, because they had not gone to college in large numbers. He was always looking for ways to bring them in, then to retain and keep them.”
To help in that effort, Touhill said, Grobman established programs to help, like a center for academic development.
“These students were all admissible to the University of Missouri,” she said. “They had passed everything necessary to get in. But sometimes because of their academic backgrounds, they needed help from writing and mathematics labs or tutorials in languages.”
Plus, she said, he strengthened and expanded the UMSL evening college, to make more programs available that students could get through in a reasonable period of time.
Finally, Touhill said, Grobman established the annual chancellor’s report to the community, where once a year, at an event downtown, UMSL’s accomplishments are reported to a large crowd of supporters.
In everything that he got done Touhill said, Grobman showed a true sense of what the campus should be and how its leadership should conduct itself.
“He was basically a very good man,” she said. “He really thought before he acted. He always tried to do the best that he could.
“He really had a sense of what public higher education was. He had a sense that it had to reach out to people and exchange information, to build information and bring people in to public higher education who needed it, and he saw that society needed particular professions.”
For his work as a herpetologist, Grobman had a salamander named after him. Several years ago, there was a movement to have the campus mascot changed to the salamander, but it was voted down; instead, the mascot is the Triton.
In an obituary in the Gainesville Sun, Grobman was remembered for strengthening and expanding what was then known as the Florida State Museum.
“He did a great job of bringing resources to the museum and expanding its operations,” said Doug Jones, the museum’s current director. “Before him, it was largely a one-man show.”
It also talked about his career before his work at the University of Florida.
“Before coming to UF,” the obituary said, “Grobman worked on the Manhattan Project and wrote a book, ‘Our Atomic Heritage.’ His daughter said the work got him into some trouble, as the government was unhappy with his statements about the dangers of nuclear power.”
Grobman’s wife, Hulda, who taught at Saint Louis University during his tenure at UMSL, died in 2006.