John U. Monro

Miles and Tougaloo College

Monro met Lucius Pitts, president of Miles College, at the annual meeting of the American Teachers Association in 1962. Pitts invited Monro to speak to the Miles faculty the following year. His talk on September 4, 1963, coincided with the bombing of Arthur Shores's home, which set off a major riot. Despite being visibly shaken by the unrest, Monro was interested to return and asked to assist in Miles College basic-skills workshop the following summer.

He left Miles for Tougaloo College, also a historically black and financially deprived college, a decade later. He taught English and served as the director of its writing center. Voted best teacher at Tougaloo College at the age of 80, he retired at the age of 84 due to Alzheimer's disease. commissioned a portrait of him for their Minority Portraiture Project. It was painted by Stephen E. Coit and unveiled in Phillips Brooks House on October 13, 2008. At the unveiling, S. Allen Counter, the foundation's executive director, said: "To give up a powerful career at Harvard to go and work at a minority school is just amazing". A second portrait hangs in the Writing Center at Tougaloo College.

Personal life Monro married Dorothy Steven Foster (d. 1984), whom he had known since his childhood in Andover, Massachusetts,

Claxton Monro (May 7, 1914 – September 20, 1991), one of John Monro's brothers, also attended Phillips Academy and graduated with a degree in engineering and business administration from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1936. After working for a couple of years for the Guaranty Trust Company and J. Walter Thompson, he attended the General Theological Seminary, graduating in 1943. He served as assistant to Sam Shoemaker at Calvary Church in Manhattan from 1942 to 1945, when he was made rector of Grace Episcopal Church. St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Houston, Texas, appointed him rector in 1950. Monro retired in 1981, the first rector of St. Stephen's to do so. He went on to work for Bell Labs as a quality control engineer and taught mathematics at the University of Maine at Orono. He attended the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, to pursue a Ph.D in statistics under the supervision of Herbert Robbins, with whom he developed the Robbins–Monro algorithm. A rule at the university prevented students who pre-published doctoral work from being awarded their degree, but his advisor published the work before Monro finished his Ph.D, meaning that he never received his Ph.D. Monro was then employed by New York City, until he was hired as associate professor of industrial engineering by Lehigh University. He was a Navy veteran of World War II and the Korean War. He had two sons and two stepsons.

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