User:15/Archive/John U. Monro

John Usher Monro was an American academic administrator and Dean of Harvard College from 1958 to 1967. He made national headlines when he left Harvard for Miles College, a historically black and then-unaccredited institution in Birmingham, Alabama.

Early life and education
Monro was born in North Andover, Massachusetts to Claxton and Frances Sutton Monro on December 23, 1912. His father was a chemist educated at Harvard University and his mother the daughter of a mill owner. From a not well-off family, he attended Phillips Academy at Andover on a scholarship and was later admitted to Harvard College, also on a scholarship. He was aware of social and racial issues, interested in Marx but refused to join the Communist Party, saying that whenever he disagreed with the communists, "they'd try to bulldoze you".

He was heavily involved in journalism at Harvard, serving as an editor for the Harvard Crimson in 1934. However, he found it too socially conservative and set up a rival daily, the Harvard Journal, which run for almost six weeks. It was more inclusive than the all-male Crimson, as it covered the entire university and had a section on Radcliffe College with its own editorial board. Upon graduating in 1934, he worked as a journalist for the Boston Transcript (officially Boston Evening Transcript) and writer for Harvard until the United States entered World War II.

War service and career at Harvard
Initially enlisting for the Public Relations department of the Navy, Monro later became damage control officer on the USS Enterprise. He was awarded a Bronze Star for his "organizational leadership" during a Kamikaze attack on the carrier near Okinawa in 1945. According to Archie Epps, Monro's dedication to racial integration began with when he was tasked by his captain to integrate his ship.

Originally intending to continue his career as a journalist after the war, he was convinced to work at Harvard’s Office of Veterans Affairs. He became director of financial aid in 1950. Disagreeing with Harvard's approach to use financial aid as a means to compete for the best applicants, he instead devised a formula to calculate applicants actual need for aid. A simplified version called the "Monro Doctrine" is still used today. He also helped set up the College Scholarship Service in the 1950s. He was awarded an L.H.D. in 1967.

Monro was strongly involved in advocacy for black students. In 1948, he started travelling to recruit promising black undergraduates, joined the board of the National Scholarship Service and Fund for Negro Students and supported the creation of the Association of African and Afro-American Students in 1963.

Miles and Tougaloo College
monro met Lucius Pitts, president of Miles College, in 1962. They organised a partnership which teamed members of Phillips Brooks House, a non-profit organisation at Harvard University, with Miles students to tutor grade-schoolers in Birmingham, Alabama. After having taught English at Miles College for three consecutive summers for free, he resigned as dean of Harvard College in 1968 to take up a position as director of freshman studies at Miles College. Aware of the impression leaving one of the most prestigious positions in American academia for a lowly paid role at an unaccredited college gave, Monro said: "I want to disassociate myself from any idea that this is a sacrifice. I see it as a job of enormous reward."monro convinced a number of graduate students and teachers to move to the South with him, while arguing that black colleges needed black leadership to achieve their aims as bastions of black institutional strength. He taught more classes than many of his former colleagues at Harvard and devised a new English and social studies curriculum.

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 until his retirement due to Alzheimer at the age of 84.

Personal life
monro married Dorothy (d. 1984) in 1936. They had two daughters. He died on March 29, 2002 in LaVerne, California with pneumonia.