Barnett, Marguerite Ross 1942–1992

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Marguerite Ross Barnett 1942–1992

College president

Marguerite Ross Barnett was the first African-American woman to lead a major American university. Appointed president of the University of Houston in 1990, her dynamic life and career were cut short by cancer just two years later. Prior to taking the Texas job, Barnett had made significant improvements while overseeing the University of Missouri-St. Louis, and had also worked for the City University of New York as a vice chancellor. Hailed as “a new generation of educational leader” in her New York Times obituary by Anthony DePalma, Barnett “urged that urban universities play a dominant role in spurring economic growth and solving social problems in the same way that land-grant colleges of a century ago did in developing America’s agricultural economy.”

Barnett was a native of Charlottesville, Virginia, where she was born on May 22, 1942, to Dewey and Mary Ross. She grew up in Buffalo, New York, and after finishing high school in 1959 she entered Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, with the goal of becoming a scientist. That course was altered when she read about modern India’s political history, in which native leaders like Mohatmas Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru successfully negotiated with British colonial authorities to secure their country’s independence. Barnett became a political science major at Antioch and earned her undergraduate degree in 1964. She went on to the prestigious University of Chicago, which granted her an M.A. in 1966 and a Ph.D. in 1972. During her time at Chicago she met and married business anthropologist Stephen A. Barnett. Some of her doctoral research involved spending long stretches of time in India, and Barnett took her husband and infant daughter along.

Began Academic Career

Barnett’s first job after leaving the University of Chicago was as an assistant professor of political science at Princeton University, in Princeton, New Jersey. She taught at the Ivy League school for six years, and went on to a stint at Howard University in Washington, D.C., which offered her a full professorship. She chaired Howard’s political science department from 1977 to 1980. In 1980, Barnett moved back to the Ivy League, teaching at New York City’s Columbia University for the next three years. At Columbia she was a professor

At a Glance…

Born May 22, 1942 in Charlottesville, VA; died February 26, 1992, in Wailuku, HI; daughter of Dewey and Mary Ross; married Stephen A. Barnett (divorced); married Walter Eugene King (a politician and professional golfer), June 30, 1980; children; (with Barnett) Amy, Education: Antioch College, Yellow Springs, OH, AB, 1964; University of Chicago, MA, 1966, PhD, 1972.

Career: University of Chicago, Chicago, IL, lecturer, 1969-70; Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, assistant professor of political science, 1970-76, and James Madison Bicentennial Preceptor, 1974-76; Howard University, Washington, DC, professor of political science, 1976-80, and chair of political science department, 1977-80; Columbia University, New York, professor of politics and education, professor of political science, and director of the Institute for Urban and Minority Education, 1980-83; City University of New York, New York, professor of political science and vice-chancellor for academic affairs, 1983-86; University of Missouri-Saint Louis, chancellor and professor of political science, 1986-90; University of Houston, Houston, TX, president, 1990-92.

Memberships: Overseas Development Council; Council on Foreign Relations; Cleveland Council.

Awards: American Political Science Association book prize, 1981, for The Politics of Cultural Nationalism in South India; Bethune-Tubman-Truth Woman of the Year Award, 1983; Association of Black Women in Higher Education Award for Educational Excellence, 1986; American Political Science COBPS Award for Excellence in Scholarship and Service to the Profession, 1986; Project on Equal Education of the NOW Legal Defense Fund, Golden GAZELLE Award, 1987.

of politics and education and professor of political science, and also served as director of Columbia’s Institute for Urban and Minority Education. City University of New York (CUNY) invited her to become professor of political science and vice-chancellor for academic affairs in 1983, and she eagerly took the job. She was part of an administration team that oversaw 180,000 students enrolled in the CUNY system’s 21 colleges. She was also able to launch a pet project: a program that worked with high schools in low-income communities to help prepare their graduates for college.

In 1986, Barnett moved to the Midwest to become chancellor and professor of political science at the University of Missouri-St. Louis (UMXL). Her accomplishments there were so impressive that she was the subject of a 1989 New York Times profile titled, “Chancellor Turns a Campus Around.” UMSL had a largely part-time commuter student body, and was hard pressed for funds when Barnett came on board. It had long been overshadowed by it’s the University of Missouri’s main campus in Columbia. During her first weeks on the job, Barnett battled a future U.S. Attorney General, John Ashcroft, who was then Missouri governor at the time. Ashcroft vetoed a bill in the state legislature that would have given UMSL money for a badly needed new library building. He told Barnett if she raised $1.2 million, he would sign off on the other $4.8 million. “Apparently there was an expectation in the state that we would not be able to raise that kind of money,” Barnett noted dryly in an interview with Amy Stuart Wells in the New York Times, and indeed school had never raised more than $30,000 at one time in its history. But Barnett raised the money, and the library was built.

Though Barnett raised money from the traditional sources like alumni ranks, she also went after the heavy-hitters: St. Louis-area Fortune 500 companies. Linking their involvement in the school to a sense of civic duty and pride, she culled donations from Anheuser-Busch, Monsanto, and other major employers in the city and surrounding suburbs, and her efforts brought $6 million in donations to UMSL and funded some of first new construction on campus since the early 1960s. Enrollment increased ten percent in just a few short years.

Took Helm in Houston

Barnett also founded Partnerships for Progress at UMSL, a program that linked urban high schools with the University’s education department. Her commitment to urban education was well articulated and, with her proven track record, her name was even mentioned as possible New York City public schools chancellor in 1989. But in 1990 Barnett left St. Louis for a job as president of the University of Houston. She was the first woman and the first African American to head the four-campus system, and also the first black of either gender to lead a major research university. At the time, she was just one of three female university presidents in the United States who presided over campuses with 30,000 students or more. Interviewed by Essence a month later, Barnett asserted her goal in Texas was “to increase the pool of minority youngsters attending college,” she told journalist David Thigpen, “and to get them to enter the burgeoning technological fields of the twenty-first century.”

The University of Houston had 33,000 students and a budget of $240 million when Barnett started on the job. It also conducted $45 million in research annually, some of it in the field of superconductivity, its specialty. Not surprisingly, Barnett undertook another fundraising campaign there with great success: the school received a $50 million gift from software billionaire John Moores and his wife, one of largest grants ever made to an American public university by an alumnus. Barnett also helped establish the Texas Center for Environmental Studies, and was the driving force behind the creation of the nationally recognized Bridge Program, which helped disadvantaged students make a successful transition from high school to college. As in St. Louis, Barnett was well liked on campus and among local leaders. When she was diagnosed with cancer in late 1991, the news stunned and saddened the academic community. With her second husband, Walter King, a former professional golfer and politician from the island nation of Bermuda, Barnett went to Hawaii, where the pair had once honeymooned. She died at a hospital there on February 26, 1992, from metastatic cancer and hypoglycemia, a blood disorder.

At the time of her death, the only woman to oversee a larger U.S. college campus than Barnett at Houston was Donna Shalala at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was appointed Secretary of Health and Human Services in 1993 by President Bill Clinton. A collection of Barnett’s papers is held at the University of Houston library, and the university established a memorial scholarship in her honor.