Orin Graff: An Educator's Educator

Orin Graff was one of the most influential and important professors in the field of educational administration in the South during the years after World War II. During his tenure at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, he established the study of educational administration as a separate curriculum, became the founding head of the Department of Educational Administration and Supervision, and turned out a large number of doctoral degree recipients who became presidents or chancellors of colleges and universities, state commissioners of education, school superintendents, deans, and university professors. He had a powerful effect on his graduate students, one of whom--a future university president and executive director of the Tennessee Higher Education Commission--recalled that Graff was the greatest of the few inspirational teachers he had had during his many years of schooling: "Nobody described Graff as being a great orator--only a great shaper of lives."

Born in Gervais, Ohio, on May 16, 1901, and reared in a large farm family of German-Swiss ancestry, Graff was educated in the public schools of Ohio and received his undergraduate degree from Ohio Northern University in 1929. Determined to be a teacher, Graff served as such in the public schools even while pursuing the bachelor's degree and during graduate education at Ohio State University for the next twelve years. For five of these years, he was a high school principal.

At Ohio State, while working on his doctorate, Graff came under the influence of Professor Boyd Bode, a friend of John Dewey and a leader in the "Progressive Movement" in education. Like his mentors, Graff came to believe that ideas are best understood in action and that "truth can be known only through its practical consequences." These were dogmas of the pragmatic philosophy which underlay Progressive Education. Graff applied this philosophy in the post he took up shortly after receiving his doctorate: in 1943, he was named professor of education at UT and superintendent of the Norris School. The dual position reflected the rather novel arrangement by which the UT College of Education ran the school in Norris which, like the town it was in, was owned by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Graff's belief in the uses of education to reform society fit nicely with TVA's own commitment to improving the lives of people living in the Tennessee Valley. During the two years he spent at Norris, Graff learned anew the value of involving the community in the work of a school and of sharing administrative responsibilities with teachers.

At the Knoxville campus, to which he moved in 1945, Graff soon was named head of the new Department of Educational Administration and Supervision and began demonstrating his own special style of teaching. What he sought to do was to encourage students to examine their own value systems by a dialogue based on the students' reading in the works of prominent philosophers. Students found the experience stimulating, exciting, and different. As one student recalled his technique: "He had the ability to shake you up without destroying you." Another put it more simply: "He would make you think." Withal, Graff's purpose was not to undermine a student's self-confidence but to develop his potential.

The new department prospered under Graff's headship. By 1951, fifty master's theses and three doctoral dissertations had been completed under the department's faculty. Graff himself flourished professionally; the years from 1954 to 1966 proved to be the richest period of his administrative and scholarly career. Two books co-authored with former students, four articles, a flock of doctoral students who assumed high positions in education, and participation in important professional organizations made Graff a major figure in his field in the Southeast. At UT, the faculty of Graff's department doubled during this twelve-year period, and the department became recognized as one of the leading departments of its kind in the country. One program for which the department became especially known was the "competency pattern" Graff devised to evaluate the performance of school administrators. An instrument developed at UT and designed to identify the characteristics of a good administrator was called "The Tennessee Rating Guide"; it became both nationally recognized and controversial.

On another level, Graff helped lead UT into the era of racial desegregation as his department accepted the first black doctoral candidate, Harry S. Blanton, and guided him to his Ed.D. degree in 1959. Graff not only persuaded Blanton to enter the doctoral program after he had received his master's degree here but aided and counseled Blanton during his graduate education through the difficult administrative barriers and social situations he encountered--the latter off, as well as on, the campus.

Graff also provided support and assistance to two women graduate students who earned the Ed.D. degree in educational administration and supervision in 1957 and 1958, the first of their gender to do so. Graff was also instrumental in securing federal funding to establish a center in the College of Education for assisting school districts in Tennessee and Kentucky (and later also in North and South Carolina) in planning their desegregation programs. Established in 1966 and headed by Professor Fred Venditti, the Educational Opportunities Planning Center (later the Race Desegregation Assistance Center and later still, the Mid-Atlantic/Appalachian Race Desegregation Assistance Center) during its twenty-year existence assisted dozens of school systems in complying with federal desegregation legislation and planning for educational change required by law. Despite uneasiness among some University administrators, the work of the center, particularly its workshops for teachers encountering interracial classes for the first time, earned high praise from city and county school superintendents and school principals. At least one UTK campus official warmly endorsed the center's activities: "I cannot think of any work which is more vital to the citizens of Tennessee . . . developing in just one public school teacher a greater sensitivity to problems of race is an enormous accomplishment. . . ." Orin Graff would have surely agreed.

Pragmatist that he was, Graff was instrumental in establishing programs that would lead to the improvement of schools at the most utilitarian level. One of these was the School Planning Laboratory, one of only two such in the country, created in 1961. The laboratory permitted doctoral students to do field work in school planning while pursuing their education at the University. Another program was the joint center for advanced graduate study in education between UT and Memphis State University (now the University of Memphis). During its eleven-year existence (1962-1973), the program permitted administrators, faculty, and students from Memphis and Knoxville to pool their experiences and to enrich their respective educations. At the same time, it made doctoral programs available to Memphians who would otherwise have had to travel to Nashville or to universities in Mississippi or Arkansas to secure them. During its history of operations, center enrollees were awarded eighty-one doctor of education and twenty-four specialist in education degrees. Significantly, the program permitted a considerable number of blacks to secure advanced degrees that might not have been available to them otherwise.

Graff stepped down as department head in 1966. By then, he had already been honored at UT with a scholarship established in his name and a distinguished professorship. He continued teaching for the next several years and served as acting dean of the College of Education for several months in 1968-1969 before retiring in 1971. Graff's last doctoral students received the same warm, affectionate, personal attention that had been accorded to his earlier protégés. All of them in turn returned "a ferocious kind of loyalty" to Graff. One of them nominated Graff for the Tennessee Education Association's Presidential Merit Award, and Graff became its fifth recipient at the organization's 1973 convention in Nashville. Perhaps the ultimate honor was the special thirty-year anniversary conference of doctoral graduates of the Department of Educational Administration and Supervision in July of 1980. The occasion was also a tribute to Graff. One of his former students opened the conference with an amusing, if slightly irreverent, reference to Graff's omnipresence in the department: "In the beginning . . . well, really . . . even before the beginning, there was Orin Graff. "

A month after this extraordinary tribute, Graff was dead. Professionally, his life reflected the development of educational administration as a recognized discipline in higher education. At UT, his career paralleled the post-World War II explosion which raised enrollments from 3,500 to more than twenty-five thousand and expanded doctoral programs from two to forty-three. In the region, his efforts to promote equal educational opportunities for blacks made him one of the advance agents of social change. As a mentor, he prepared an extraordinary number of individuals for high levels of responsibility in higher education and in state and local school administrations. And his lasting influence, everyone agrees, was measurable not in the scholarly publications he authored but in the lives he touched.

[Source: Lonnie Butler, "Orin Benton Graff: Personal and Professional Dimensions of a Progressive Professor of Educational Administration and Supervision." Ed.D. dissertation, University of Tennessee, 1993]