He Made It Look Easy

by Tim Ungs

Thomas A. Spragens was Centre’s greatest 20th-century president, but he made his many accomplishments look easy

In his remarks at the March 4, 2006, memorial service for President Emeritus Thomas A. Spragens, Max Cavnes, retired dean of men, cited Emerson’s remark that an institution is the lengthened shadow of one man.

“A historian writing about Centre College in the 19th century might very well speak of John C. Young as that shadow,” Cavnes said, “but there is no doubt in my mind that what you see about you today is the lengthened shadow of Thomas Arthur Spragens.”

When news of Spragens’ death on Feb. 11 was announced, remembrances poured forth from the Centre community. Some wrote of his exacting diction and impressively dignified baritone voice (see Ed Hatchett ’73’s essay). Many mentioned his personal warmth and attentiveness, and that of his wife, Catharine.

But of all the anecdotes, none summed up the man’s otherworldly dignity and grace as much as the one offered by Mona Wyatt, director of donor relations and parent programs.

“He’s one of the few men I know,” she wrote, “who mowed the lawn in a tie.”

Thomas A. Spragens grew up not 30 miles from Danville, but he took a rather indirect route to Centre College. As one of four promising Lebanon High School students in the early 1930s, he caught the eye of Centre’s then-president, Charles Turck, who recruited this “Centre quartet” with some vigor. Three obliged by enrolling at Centre, but Spragens opted instead for the commerce program at the University of Kentucky. (Ironically, he soon transferred to the College of Arts and Sciences, where he “found the richness missing in the specialized field of commerce.”)

A graduate fellowship at Syracuse University’s prestigious Maxwell School of Citizenship and Public Affairs, jobs in both the Kentucky and federal governments, a position representing Stanford University in Washington, D.C., and a year with the Ford Foundation’s Fund for the Advancement of Education for predated his presidency of Missouri’s Stephens College, then as now a women’s college. It was at Stephens that a phone call from Centre trustee Don Campbell ’22 connected Spragens, finally, with his Centre destiny.

“I wasn’t looking for a change,” Spragens said, “but I was a Kentuckian. I was aware that Kentucky had lagged behind the nation in its educational, economic and cultural development, but I was also aware that Centre was the best, small liberal arts college in the state.”

Spragens recognized Centre’s potential, including a small but “first class faculty” with “no deadwood . . . evident.” However, the College also had many obstacles to overcome, including shaky finances, “obsolescent” facilities and a “provincial” outlook.

Upon taking office in 1957, he referred often to a simple chart on a single sheet of paper that compared Centre to 14 colleges of “potentially similar caliber”—Amherst and Wesleyan as well as such regional peers as Davidson, Sewanee, Denison and Kenyon—in terms of student enrollment, size of and percentage of doctorates in the faculty, and other measures of academic excellence.

Spragens made it clear from the outset that he would integrate Centre, and he delivered on his promise. Where so many other college presidents were overwhelmed by the social unrest of the era, Spragens held his campus together. Centre held a Day of Concern following the Kent State shootings in 1970, and Spragens (who was a delegate for antiwar candidate Eugene McCarthy at the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago) channeled the campus’ energies in a positive and focused way: he had a group of students compose a statement about the war and deliver it to President Nixon along with an emissary, John Sherman Cooper ’22, at the time a Centre trustee as well as a highly respected U.S. senator from Kentucky.

When Spragens arrived at Centre, the College had 450 students. When he left in 1981, the number stood at 700. During his tenure, the faculty nearly doubled, from 38 to 68. The endowment grew from $2.8 million to $18.7 million, the capital assets from $5 million to $38 million. He oversaw the construction of the Norton Center (then called the Regional Arts Center), as well as Doherty Library and Crounse Hall (then the Hall of Learning), Young Hall (for science), all the fraternity residences, the North Campus residence halls and the Hillside Houses, and Cowan Dining Commons, as well as a major renovation of Sutcliffe Hall (athletics and student center). During the final three years of his presidency, the College’s Fund for the Future campaign overshot its $30-million target by $4 million. In 1971, Centre received a Phi Beta Kappa chapter; it was, and remains, one of the smallest colleges in the country to be so honored with the nation’s preeminent academic honorary society.

It sounds like an awful lot to accomplish, but to Spragens, it was all in a day’s work. “This is fundamentally a pretty simple story,” he once said. “This institution did not have a complicated purpose. We simply set out on a course, well-defined, plugged away, and I think have a cause for a considerable sense of accomplishment in the things we have done.”

Simple to him maybe, but this was a man who mowed the lawn in the sweltering Danville heat in a tie.

He just made it look easy.

Tim Ungs is the media associate in Centre’s Communications Office.

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