Umphrey Lee

Umphrey Lee (March 23, 1893 – June 23, 1958) was a Methodist theologian and historian who served as the fourth president of Southern Methodist University from 1939 to 1954. Lee, who had been SMU's first undergraduate student body president, succeeded religious hard-liner C. C. Selecman, and is remembered for fostering an intellectual environment conducive to free research and learning. Along with Dean Merrimon Cuninggim, he was also the driving force behind the effort to begin desegregating SMU in 1952—years before other southern colleges and fellow Methodist universities, Duke University and Emory University.

Lee, a leading scholar on John Wesley and Methodist theology, was a member of the Medieval Academy of America, the American Historical Society, the American Society of Church History, and the Philosophical Society of Texas. From 1937 to 1939, he was Dean of the School of Religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. Lee signaled a new direction for the university in part by identifying and praising faculty for scholarly publications. In his first years, he also called for increasing the library budget, lifted the ban on dances, launched the university's annual funding campaign (led by former SMU president Hiram Boaz), and ended the compulsory chapel attendance.

In 1943, Lee was caught up in a national controversy when the former Mayor of Akron, Ohio, C. Nelson Sparks, published a book featuring a letter that purported to show the SMU president's involvement in a plot by high-level Democrats to make Wendell Willkie the Republican nominee for president in 1944. The anti-Willkie Nelson, supported by Senator William Langer, claimed that the letter was proof that Roosevelt advisor Harry Hopkins had conspired with Lee, and that for his part in the scheme, Lee would receive Hopkins' help when he challenged Tom Connally for his seat in the U.S. Senate. Hopkins and Lee denounced the letter, in which Lee's name was misspelled, as a forgery, leading to the involvement of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In January 1944, a grand jury indicted George N. Briggs, suspended assistant to Interior Secretary Harold Ickes, for forgery.

After the Second World War, Lee accommodated an influx of GI Bill students with a small village of temporary buildings called "Trailerville." In 1949, Lee brought a chapter of Phi Beta Kappa to campus.

In November 1950, Lee approached the Board of Trustees with a proposal to amend the university admissions policy to permit the matriculation of Black students. Cuninggim replied that he would not accept the position unless SMU had plans to desegregate. Lee is said to have responded, "The way is open now. You can start working on it the day you come." He was 65.

Legacy

Lee was a national figure in his lifetime. At SMU, he was welcomed with great fanfare after the austere, discordant tenure of CC Selecman. In contrast to his predecessor, Lee was scholarly and personable leader who, like SMU's first president, Robert Stewart Hyer, believed that the university could be far more than a small religious college in Texas.