James E. McLeod – a professor and dean who served four decades at Washington University and helped thousands of students and faculty to succeed – passed away on September 6, 2011 of lung cancer. He was 67.
“No single individual has had a greater impact on the vitality and the quality of student life at this university,” said Chancellor Mark S. Wrighton. “Jim was truly a man of wisdom, compassion, and steadfast loyalty to the university. He enjoyed deep and lasting respect from all who were fortunate to interact with him.”
“For those of us at Washington University whose memories go back 25 years or more, Jim McLeod was the cornerstone upon which this school is built,” said Gerald Early, director of the Center for the Humanities at Washington University.
“Jim was not only an influence in the world of students and the curriculum, but he directed the African and African American Studies Program and kept it afloat, was largely responsible for the acquisition of the Hampton Archive, helped to launch the Black Alumni Council, and was mostly behind our joining the network of Mellon-Mays schools that encourage and support minority undergraduates to pursue the Ph.D.”
McLeod received the St. Louis American Foundation’s 2008 Lifetime Achiever award at the 2008 Salute to Excellence in Education.
“Jim McLeod was a rare and beloved person who will be deeply missed and who can never be completely replaced in this community,” said Donald M. Suggs, president of the St. Louis American Foundation.
“He was a pioneer as a scholar and administrator at a world-class university, yet one that has not always done as well at its peers at attracting and retaining African-American, intellectual talent. St. Louis owes Jim an enduring debt for nurturing a great many supremely talented African Americans in St. Louis. His gentle spirit was accompanied by a singular brilliance in a challenging area of scholarship.”
As director of the John B. Ervin Scholars Program, which was established in 1986 for the most promising African-American students, McLeod was known for his endlessly caring and nurturing spirit.
“One of his legacies was that he never stopped working for other people,” said Courtney Crawford, an Ervin Scholar from 1996 to 2000 who is now a physician. “When you talk about changing lives and making dreams come true, that’s what Jim McLeod embodies. He was truly a man whose walk was consistent with every word.”
Charles Brown Jr., an Ervin Scholar who graduated in 1996, said McLeod taught him many things, but humility stands out above the rest.
“The more personable thing we all learn from him was how to be the most important person in the room by being the most humble person in the room,” Brown said.
Charles’ mother Shirley Brown said she and her husband were active on the Washington University parent council because both of their sons, Charles Jr. and the attorney Daniel R. Brown, were Ervin Scholars.
When Charles Brown Sr. became superintendent at the Wellston School district in 2005, he spoke to McLeod about ways the university could collaborate with Wellston. McLeod called Charles Sr. later and presented the idea of having Wash. U. host a summer school program for Wellston students. Soon after, Wellston met an extraordinary goal – all of the graduating seniors went on to colleges. It was largely because their eyes had been opened on Wash U’s campus, the Browns said.
“Without him, there was no way Wellston could have done something like that,” Shirley Brown said. “Jim got things done quietly. He empowered people. He enabled other people to want to help others.”
Though his impact on Wellston students was profound, McLeod would quietly say, “We are just being good neighbors of Wellston,” Shirley said. “You could see how that would make the students feel comfortable instantly.”
In 2004, McLeod led the transition to opening the Ervin Scholars program to all students, regardless of race. This year marked the inaugural for the McLeod Scholars Program, an undergraduate scholarship endowment that honors McLeod.
‘The most important people’
Christina Williams interned at the Ervin Scholars office from her freshman year in 2007 to 2011, while also being part of the program.
“From the moment you walked on campus, he knew all of our names, where we were from and our background stories,” said Williams, who graduated with a double major in Spanish and Anthropology.
Williams knew McLeod for most of her life because his daughter and her brother were classmates since preschool. However, she and her friends still thought of him as a celebrity on campus.
“He was so important, but he would go out of his way to talk to us,” Williams said. “We would pretend like we were going to pass out when we saw him, he was such a celebrity.”
For many students, it was like having an “ever-present, moral and intellectual compass” available to them any time they needed him, said Jerome Strickland, an Ervin Scholar from 1996 to 2000.
“Dean McLeod made all of us students feel as though we were the most important people on the planet,” Strickland said. “His ‘Habits of Achievement’ lessons ingrained in me and my peers a more intense commitment to disciplined preparation in all areas of our lives. I cannot imagine how broad the effects of his leadership have spread.”
From 2002 to 2005, Strickland became part of the Ervin program staff. Strickland watched as McLeod demonstrated how gentle, thoughtful words can yield incredible influence, he said.
“In fact, just like Sampson, I think his power was in his hair – his Afro was legendary,” Strickland said.
A campus lifeline
One of the reasons why Courtney Crawford came to Wash U was because he was McLeod as a father figure he could look up to and lean on, he said.
“He believed in our abilities probably more than we believed in ourselves,” Crawford said. “Despite stumbles and hurdles, today I’m a physician, and Dean Mac helped me over those rough patches, undoubtedly.”
Charles Brown Jr. said among the 100,000 licensed architects in the United States, 1,800 are African American. The School of Architecture reflected as much during his undergraduate years, he said.
“Being at a majority institute like Wash. U., you could feel isolated or alone,” he said. “The Ervin Scholar program gave me a family on the campus so I didn’t feel isolated.”
Chris King, managing editor of The St. Louis American, knew McLeod as an undergraduate, a graduate student and an adjunct faculty member in the African-American studies program.
“He was helpful to me at every level,” King said. “He was always this calm presence who knew how the university system worked and tried to help people succeed in that system. He was a lifeline to black students and faculty – but not only to black students and faculty.”
McLeod’s service to community didn’t stop at the Danforth Campus.
He served as a member of the Board of Trustees of the American Youth Foundation, the National Council on Youth Leadership, the St. Louis Art Museum, and Churchill Center & School for Learning Disabilities. He chaired the board of the Express Scripts Foundation and the advisory board of New City School.
“He had the expectation for all students – not just the scholars – to develop a responsibility towards community, towards self and towards and the global community,” said Charles Brown Jr. “He wanted the scholars to embrace community leadership as much as he expected us to embrace academic excellence.”
Foundation of respect
Jim McLeod grew up in Dothan, Alabama where he learned a great respect for education from his parents and family, he told The American in a 2008 interview.
With the support of his family, he graduated from Morehouse College in Atlanta and received his graduate degree at Rice University in Houston. His research included the cultural history of turn-of-the-century Vienna and post-war Germany. He also spent a summer as a volunteer in Kenya with Operation Crossroads Africa and studied for two years at the University of Vienna in Austria.
While he said it was not his original plan to be a professor and spend his career on some the nation’s most prestigious campuses, “I thought about the long term.”
“I wanted to take the steps that would help me make the most of where I was and what I was doing,” he said.
He found that space at Wash. U. in 1974 as an assistant professor of German, after a previous position in the German department at Indiana University in Bloomington.
He went on to hold various administrative positions, including: assistant dean of the Graduate School of Arts & Sciences from 1974-77; assistant to Chancellor William H. Danforth from 1977-1987; and director of the African and Afro-American Studies Program (now known as African & African American Studies) from 1987 until 1992, when he was appointed dean of the College of Arts & Sciences.
In his 2008 interview, McLeod said he was just as enthused about academia then as he had ever been in his life.
“In some ways, I even enjoy it more,” he told the American.
“As you get older things take on new meaning. Since I know what I am doing can mean for the community, it still charges me up. I am doing something that can last for generations. That’s what makes this a terrific job.”
In addition to his many achievements, McLeod was a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and a NDEA (National Defense Education Act) Fellow. In 1991, he received the Washington University Founders Day Distinguished Faculty Member Award.
“We oftentimes don’t see or hear of current legacies and individuals of greatness,” said Courtney Crawford. “We’re always talking about people who lived 50 years ago. Jim McLeod is that example. You don’t have to look further than Jim McLeod.”
“There is so much that all of us – faculty, staff, and students – owe Jim McLeod, for he truly enriched this place,” said Gerald Early. “Words are inadequate to describe the nature and extent of that debt.”
He is survived by his wife Clara, a librarian in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences in Arts & Sciences; a daughter, Sara, of Atlanta; his father, the Rev. James C. McLeod of Dothan; a brother, Jeff McLeod of Birmingham; and two sisters, Alice Head and Mary Parker, both of Dothan. He was preceded in death by his mother, Earline McLeod.Visitation will be 4 to 8 p.m. Friday, Sept. 9, at the Austin Layne Normandy Chapel, 7733 Natural Bridge Road, Normandy, Mo., 63121. The funeral service will be for family and close friends at 11 a.m. Saturday, Sept. 10, at Cote Brilliante Presbyterian Church, 4673 Labadie Ave., St. Louis, Mo., 63115. Burial will be in South Carolina.
In lieu of flowers, the family requests memorial gifts to the James E. McLeod Scholars Fund. Please make checks payable to Washington University and send to Washington University in St. Louis, One Brookings Drive, Campus Box 1082, One Brookings Drive, St. Louis, MO 63130.
The university will hold a memorial event to honor McLeod’s life and service at 1:30 p.m. Sunday, Oct. 9, in the Athletic Complex Field House.
