Umphrey Lee

[1][2] Lee, who had been SMU's first undergraduate student body president, succeeded religious hard-liner C. C. Selecman, and is remembered for fostering an intellectual environment conducive to free research and learning.

Beginning in 1929 at the start of the U.S. Great Depression, Highland Park Methodist Church undertook a new missionary outreach in China, with Rev.

Hubert L. Sone has been our Special we have come to regard him as much a part of the ministry of this church as our preacher in charge.”,[5] From 1937 to 1939, he was Dean of the School of Religion at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.

[1][2] In his inaugural address, he compared SMU, a university that had only existed for a couple decades, favorably with the country's much older elite institutions:"We can take advantage of a century of educational experience without having to live through it.

[7] In his first years, he also called for increasing the library budget, lifted the ban on dances, launched the university's annual funding campaign (led by former SMU president Hiram Boaz), and ended the compulsory chapel attendance.

After the Second World War, Lee accommodated an influx of GI Bill students with a small village of temporary buildings called "Trailerville.

"[12] In November 1950, Lee approached the Board of Trustees with a proposal to amend the university admissions policy to permit the matriculation of Black students.

In fact, Lee was in his office in SMU's Fondren Library at work on a tenth book, Our Fathers and Us: The Heritage for Methodism, when he suffered a fatal heart attack, dying on the way to the hospital.

In contrast to his predecessor, Lee was scholarly and personable leader who, like SMU's first president, Robert Stewart Hyer, believed that the university could be far more than a small religious college in Texas.

[7] He commended his faculty for their publications, invested heavily in the school of theology, and, most importantly, initiated the process of desegregation—years before other southern universities were legally forced to do so.

It may also account for his deference to conservative donors when they asked him to stop a small group of liberal faculty from holding a private, off-campus rally for presidential candidate Adlai Stevenson—something Lee's administration sheepishly agreed to do.