If NIU’s governing board had been looking for a break with the past in a new president, they couldn’t have found a better agent for that change than Rhoten A. Smith.

To begin with, Smith was the first NIU president without a normal school / teachers college background. His doctorate in political science was from the University of California at Berkeley; his experience as a teacher and administrator had been at large public and private universities; and his research and writing placed him high among his colleagues as a scholar. At the time he was chosen for the NIU presidency, Smith was dean of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Temple University in Philadelphia.

Perhaps more importantly, Rhoten Smith’s genuine belief in the rights of students and faculty to govern themselves would prove valuable in the extraordinarily tumultuous time ahead. He was described as low-key, easy to talk to, and always willing to listen to all sides of every question.

Yet Smith’s easygoing demeanor could not be mistaken for complacency. He had a vision for “a new university,” and a commitment to social justice that transformed NIU.

“It is my conviction,” Smith said in his inaugural address, “that the public universities can and must find ways to make more widely available opportunities for earning this passport to the good life. To fail to do so is to bar the door to a hopeful future in the very faces of those of our citizens who have least to hope for from life.”

Smith’s New University vision included less emphasis on growing sheer numbers of students, and more attention to the quality of student learning, rewards for great research and scholarship, more multidisciplinary work, and significantly more openness around and wider participation in university governance.

He opened University Council meetings to the public, and supported voting student members.  He established the position of Ombudsman to help students with their personal problems. He established the CHANCE program to help underprepared students gain access to and succeed at NIU. He regularly met with students and faculty for coffee, and he presented weekly “Chats with Rhoten Smith” over the campus radio.

And as a response to statewide planning efforts, he established NIU’s Academic Planning Committee (APC) to create “our own institutional master plan.” 

Yet for all the momentum Rhoten Smith initiated, his presidency was encumbered by  challenges unlike any his predecessors had experienced. Beyond his first year at NIU (and the unexpected open heart surgery he required at the beginning of his second year), Rhoten Smith was at the center of an unrelenting period of protest and civil unrest. 

Black students demanded change. Anti-war protests decried U.S. involvement in Vietnam. The killing of four students at Kent State, and two at Jackson State, occasioned huge demonstrations. Sit-ins, walk-outs, marches and riots were the backdrop of the Smith years. Yet his reputation as a fair-minded progressive who protected free speech and listened to students’ grievances helped Smith gain students’ trust and minimize violence.

On January 6, 1971, Smith told a stunned University Council that he would be leaving NIU in August to become provost at the University of Pittsburgh, a position he would hold for 12 years, until his retirement in 1983.

Though Rhoten Smith’s tenure as NIU president was short, his progressive vision and calm leadership left a deep impression. Both of NIU’s most recent presidents invoked Smith’s name and legacy in their inaugural remarks. And when he died in 2003, Rhoten Smith was remembered at NIU as “exactly the right person for the times.”

Click on photos to enlarge