Joseph A. Williams

1962-1981

Although he never applied for the position, Joseph A. Williams, the university’s vice president was the person most faculty members felt was best for the job of dean after John Dotson retired in 1962. Faculty members Ira Aaron, James Greene and Doyne Smith went to University President O.C. Aderhold and told him so, but at first, Aderhold refused the request because he needed Williams to help in University-wide matters.

Aderhold and Williams directed the most remarkable “brick and mortar” period in the history of the university up to that time.

Williams was a native of Bainbridge, Ga. He attended South Georgia Teachers College (now Georgia Southern University) for two years and then transferred to UGA where he graduated in 1936. He served as a high school principal in Georgia and South Carolina before entering the Navy during World War II where he served as a navigator, gunner and operations officer in the Pacific. After the war, he returned to the university, earning two master’s degrees.

Williams joined the UGA faculty as assistant professor of education in 1946. His doctoral dissertation involved the development of the financial basis for the Minimum Foundation Program, a new plan of determining school systems’ required local support, using an economic index to determine ability to pay. In 1948, he earned the first doctor of education degree ever given by UGA. His major professor was O.C. Aderhold.

Williams then went to the University of Kentucky for a year and came back to Athens in 1950 and when Dean Aderhold become UGA’s President in 1951, he became Vice President and Aderhold’s closest advisor.

When Williams took office as Dean of Education in July, 1962, it was a time of great shortage of teachers. A faculty of 78 in the College were training one-third of all new teachers hired in Georgia each year. University Placement Services received vacancy notices from 912 Georgia schools, most of them involving multiple positions. From out-of-state came 2,540 requests for teachers. Colleges and universities sought 662 education professors. In response to these needs, Dean Williams began one of the most remarkable building programs in teacher education.

In an effort to extend the College’s research productivity, Dean Williams increased the number o faculty members who had assigned research time to 31 out of the 87 faculty members. Of the 87 faculty members, 55 held doctorates. The College’s percentage of doctorates was 63 percent compared to the university’s 52.5 percent.

A new Ph.D. program in educational psychology was begun, jointly sponsored by the Colleges of Education, and Arts & Sciences. A new program was also developed in library education leading to a master’s degree.

In the first years of the Williams administration, the College’s public services were generally continued. Workshops were conducted around the state, including a Science Institute for Elementary School teachers conducted in Gainesville under the auspices of the National Science Foundation.

The Bureau of Educational Studies and Field Services extended its program for superintendents with 130 of the state’s superintendents participating, 53 of them for credit. The Superintendents’ Research and Development Program grew out of the Bureau’s activities. This was to become one of the most important programs in the history of Georgia education.

Important service components of the College were its clinics. During the 1963-64 years, the Reading Clinic conducted 128 diagnoses of the reading problems of children from 35 different counties. Sixty children received remedial reading instruction. Dr. Byron Callaway become director of the Reading Clinic in the fall of 1963.

The Speech and Hearing Clinic conducted 693 diagnoses, treated 971 clients and administered 1253 screening surveys.

By fall of 1964, Counselor Education offered two new programs – one for student personnel workers in higher education and another for the training of rehabilitation counselors.

Education reform was again in the air when Carl Sanders became governor of Georgia in the early 1960s. As Georgia increased its appropriations for education, other states were increasing theirs more rapidly than Georgia. In 1961, Georgia ranked 46th among states in financial support for education.

In 1963, a doctoral program in mathematics education was established

The College began to reach national prominence in the mid-1960s. The University was cited by the American Association of Colleges of Teacher Education as having an “Program of Excellence” in 1965.

One of the factors that contributed to the increased national visibility was the increase in research and publication. Dean Williams increased the number of faculty with research time assignments to 69. More than 100 of the faculty’s articles were published in scholarly journals in 1964-65.

With President Aderhold’s support, Dean Williams continued to upgrade the College’s faculty, adding 20 new members during 1964, 14 of whom held doctorates, bringing the college’s total to 116.

The 1965-66 period was one of remarkable achievement for the College. About $3.5 million in grants and gifts came to the College. The most dramatic of these was the contract for the Research and Development Center in Educational Stimulation. Its budget for the academic year was $400,000. The major figures in this project were Drs. Kathyrn Blake and Marion Rice.

More than 20 new faculty members were added in the fall of 1966 and the college was allocated 60 additional positions for the 1967-68 year. The best known of the new faculty members was Dr. E. Paul Torrance in educational psychology who came to UGA as the chair of the department. He was already known throughout the world for his research and writing in the area of creativity and gifted education.

The Torrance Tests of Creativity were published in 1965. By the time Torrance retired from UGA in 1985, these tests had been translated into more than 30 languages.

By the end of 1967, the College had 163 faculty members, 88 of which had some assigned research time. Thirty-one members were of the Graduate Faculty. During the year, the College enrolled more than 5,000 teachers through its in-service programs in 44 different locations.

As the college grew in almost all dimensions, the need for more administrative help became apparent. In 1968, three associate deans were named: Stanley Ainsworth, Alex Perrodin and Doyne Smith.

In the fall of 1967, the College published the first issue of the Journal of Research and Development in Education. It was the first such journal to be published in the South and would be held in high esteem for the next three decades.

Another “first” was launched in 1969, Dr. Sheldon Root founded the Children’s Literature Award and Conference with the support of Dean Williams. The annual Georgia Book Awards and Conference of Children’s Literature has remained strong and is now in its 39th year with nearly 500 participants each year.

The summer of 1969 also brought the loss of one of the towering figures of the College and university. President Emeritus O.C. Aderhold died on July 4. He had guided the university for 17 years, during which its student enrollment tripled, its service activities expanded especially through the Agricultural Extension Service, the Georgia Center for Continuing Education, the Institute for Community and Area Development, the Institute of Government, and the off-campus courses taught all over the state, especially by the College of Education.

Aderhold had been associated with UGA for some 50 years as a student, teacher, administrator and elder statesman.

The late 1960s was a period of greater specialization for the college. Several factors made diversification possible during that period. The large number of students meant that a professor-strudent ratio acceptable to the Board of Regents could be maintained as a greater number of new courses were offered.

In 1969, new programs were approved the prepared people to become directors of libraries, directors of guidance and directors of pupil personnel services as well as programs for master’s in audiology and a specialist’s degree in teaching those who were mentally retarded.

The creation of a Mental Retardation Center brought help and hope to many despairing families. A building named Rivers Crossing, financed by Department of Health, Education and Welfare funds was built on the Oconee River and Andrew Shotick was named coordinator of the 12 instructional programs placed in the center. In cooperation with the Georgia State Department of Health, the center provided diagnosis and therapy for 80 mentally retarded children and youth while allowing practicum or extensive observation for UGA students preparing to work with the mentally retarded.

The College wholeheartedly supported Gov.-elect Jimmy Carter’s plans to hire 300 new kindergarten teachers for Georgia’s schools. Dr. Keith Osborn, an expert in early childhood education, who was a member of the planning committee which launched the Federal government’s Headstart and Follow Though programs, was the fist Headstart Director. He also was a consultant for the popular children’s educational TV program, “Sesame Street.”

Because people in education usually refrained from refuting criticism that was ill-placed, the college initiated a weekly column by Dean Williams to improve positive publicity on a variety of topics.

Within six months, “Joe Williams on Education” began to appear in 34 weekly newspapers across the state of Georgia. Williiams and Dr. Reece Wells wrote the column but got occasional help from other faculty members. Some articles were simply informative, but others were hard-hitting statements on educational issues of the day. Topics were enormously varied: National Teachers Examination, better use of the 12th grade, politics and education, cost of dropouts, mathematically disadvantaged children, day care centers, parents who ought not be allowed to have children, high school pregnancies, and summer juvenile deliquency.

Beginning in 1969, seven stories of yellow brick rose on South Campus. It was “Aderhold Hall, many years in the dreaming, five years in the planning, and two years in the building,” reported a story in the Sept. 26, 1971 edition of the Athens Banner-Herald.

Faculty and staff moved into Aderhold in the spring of 1971. Since Dean Williams had been in charge of the University’s building program under President Aderhold, he knew how to get the most building for the least money. Aderhold Hall and the new Industrial Arts building together had cost $5.24 million or $19.71 per square foot, and Aderhold alone was 201,284 square feet.

By the fall of 1971, 255 of the College’s 300-plus faculty were in Aderhold. Others were in the Physical Education building, the Industrial Arts building, the Mental Retardation Center, Fain, Dudley and Griggs.

The new College of Education building incuded 225 offices, 33 classrooms, 11 conference rooms, 18 laboratories, 12 seminar rooms and a reading library. The faculty also boasted of having the first escalators on campus, but the boast was short lived. Studies had shown that escalators were the most efficient way to manage the number of people who would using the first four floors. Those studies were based, however, on the assumption that the escalators would work. They soon began to break down with great regularity, and today they were soon “converted” to stairs.

More than 20 years later, the escalators were removed and some 2,200 square feet of new dedicated research office space was constructed on the four floors where the escalators had been. Those offices were opened in March 2007.

Growing confidence in the field of education was reflected in the fact that certified teachers were returning in greater numbers for advanced training. From 1971 to 1972, the number of students receiving graduate degrees nearly doubled—from 786 to 1,392.

Perhaps because the College was on the forefront of many of the changes in education of teachers, the undergraduate enrollment continued to climb (up 13.6 percent in 1972) at a time when other education colleges saw declining enrollment. Graduate enrollment also rose in 1972. For the first time in the College’s history, more students earned graduate degrees (1,230) than undergraduate degrees 1,092).

Enrollment dipped slightly in the mid-1970s. The College had 348 people on the instructional faculty in fall 1974, plus 37 more people holding rank and courtesy titles and the Dean. Nine people were added to the Graduate Faculty bringing the total in the College to 81.

In 1978, the College had 304 instructional faculty and 44 others who held rank or courtesy titles. As enrollment continued to decrease, the College’s faculty pursued more research and public service. Faculty members authored nearly 700 publications and 215 papers presented at professional conferences during the year. Fifty-nine percent of the faculty had one or more publications for the year. Members of the faculty served as editors or consulting editors on 29 journals.

In public service, faculty members presented at seven on the international level, 483 on the national level, 1,239 on the state level and 82 on the local level. The College initiated 13 new conferences at the Georgia Center. There were 47 other conferences that had been held by the College on an annual basis, many reaching back into the 1930s.

As retirement neared for Dean Williams, faculty concerned about having more input on tenure, promotion and merit pay authorized the College of Education Faculty Senate in the fall 1978 and 35 members were selected to serve as senators.

In 1980, the College of Education was again emblazoned in the national headlines. In the winter of 1979, Dr. James A. Dinnan was a member of the College’s Promotions Review Committee that reviewed the application of Maija Blaubergs for tenure and promotion. It was the third year that the assistant professor had been turned down, and she was notified that her contract would not be renewed. She sued the university, charging that she had been denied promotion and tenure because she was a woman. Such a denial would violate Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

As the case developed, Judge Wilbur Owens ordered members of the Promotion Review Committee to reveal how they voted on Dr. Blaubergs’ application. On April 18, 1980, Dr. Dinnan refused to say how he voted, holding that to be force to do so was a violation of both academic freedom and the right to a secret ballot.
On June 3, Owens held Dinnan to be in contempt of court. He ordered Dinnan to pay a fine of $100 per day for each day of silence and warning him that he would be imprisoned at the end of a 30-day period for 90 days if he still refused to say.

Dinnan paid the first day. The next day former Secretary of State Dean Rusk—then a Georgia law professor gave the court $100. Over the next four weeks, 28 other colleagues followed Rusk’s lead until on July 3, Owens sent Dinnan to prison for 90 days. Dinnan could free himself at any time, the judge told him, by revealing his vote.

Dinnan steadfastly refused to talk, and he worse his academic robes when he surrendered to begin his prison term to show that “in effect, the federal government will be locking up the University of Georgia.”

The photo of a professor dressed in full academic regalia showed up in newspapers and magazines across the country, sending shock waves throughout academic communities.

The case dragged on for six years and Dr. Blaubergs completed law school at UGA and eventually took a job as a staff attorney with the Fifth U.S. Circuit of Appeals, which refused Dinnan’s appeal.

Dinnan never revealed how he voted.

After 19 years as Dean of Education, Joseph A. Williams announced his retirement in June 1981. During this time, he also served a term as President of the Southern Council on Teacher Education and received the highest accolade for a dean of education—election as President of the Association of Deans of Colleges of Education in Land Grant Universities.

Williams guided the College calmly and steadily through the most explosive growth periods in its history. It was also a turbulent period of social and political change in American society in general and in particular on the campus colleges across America.

Since assuming the leadership of a faculty of 87 in 1962, with an operating budget of $910,000, guided its development toward becoming a major component of the University with 314 faculty members and a budget in excess of $13,250,000. Graduate faculty grew from 16 to 107; faculty publication jumped more than 1,500 percent; faculty salaries almost tripled; both the mathematics and reading education programs have been chosen number one in the nation by peer groups; the educational psychology program is in the nation’s top five; the college itself is ranked among the top 20 in the country.

He recruited outstanding educators from throughout the nation who have contributed to the College’s nationwide reputation as a resource in teaching, research and service that remains vibrant today. Williams conferred 27,271 undergraduate degrees upon students, a figure that was about half of Georgia’s entire teaching force in the 1980s.

When asked about the changes that had been made during his administration, Dean Williams gave one of the understatements for which he was known. “Probably the development of graduate programs, particularly at the doctoral degree level.”

Part of the reason for the college’s rapid growth rate reflects back on his philosophy of administration. Since 1962, the college has collected more than $134 million in funds, $38 million of those in grants.

“Dean Williams knew how to hire faculty members with the know-how to obtain grants,” said associate education dean Reece Wells.

Williams concurred, however modestly: “Whatever success we have is due to the type of faculty we have. As dean, I haven’t made the accomplishments; the faculty has made them.”