Robert Morse: 1967-1970
Robert Morse, Case Western Reserve University's first president, died January 19, 2001 in Falmouth, Massachusetts. He was 79.
He also was a senior scientist at the Woods
Hole Oceanographic Institution, assistant secretary of
the navy,
and a dean at Brown
University. A physicist, President Morse specialized in
superconductivity and underwater acoustics.
Robert Morse became president of Case at its federation July
1, 1967, and served until he started a leave of absence in
October 1970. He had come to Cleveland in 1966, as president
of Case Institute of Technology.
Overseeing the federation of CIT and Western Reserve University
was a complex task. It involved combining duplicate departments
in areas such as chemistry and physics, eliminating administrative
overlap, and organizing the entire faculty of four colleges
and eight professional schools into a single University faculty.
Among challenges he encountered were establishing a common
policy for institutional functions such as compensation, and
unifying extracurricular groups such as the student newspapers
and football teams.
"Case Western Reserve University has a greater capacity
for constructive and collective change than any other university
in the country," President Morse wrote about the federation.
"Considering federation and all that it has meant, we
at Case Western Reserve University now have a greater chance
than any other university to create new forms in education,
to reshape, to adapt the old, to adopt the new, to reform,
to develop a new kind of university."
During his term as Case's president, he found himself
in the midst of student demonstrations in a city torn by racial
strife. He took pride in the fact that he never had to call
the police to quell a campus disruption. He and his administrators
talked to the students instead.
He also tried to help heal the racial division in Cleveland
by serving as an honorary campaign chairman for Carl
Stokes, who, in 1967, was elected the first African-American
mayor of a major American city. In addition, President Morse
was the first university president in Ohio to speak out against
the National Guard's attack on students at Kent State
University in May 1970, calling it "an act of assassination
against American youth."
After reaching an impasse with Case's Board of Trustees,
he left the University in 1971 to become director of research
at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution. In 1973, he became
associate director, senior scientist, and dean of graduate
studies. In 1979, he became director of Woods Hole's Marine
Policy Center. He retired from the oceanographic institution
in 1983.
President Morse had extensive experience in both education
and research. He was on the Brown University faculty from 1946
to 1966, chaired its physics department from 1960 to 1962,
and was dean of the college from 1962 to 1964.
In 1964, President Lyndon Johnson appointed Robert Morse,
who had served as a naval officer from 1943 to 1946, as assistant
secretary for the navy for research and development. In that
position, which he held until 1966, he was responsible for
a budget of nearly $2 billion.
As a member of the National
Academy of Sciences' Project Nobska in 1956, he was
instrumental in the creation of the Polaris missile submarines.
President Morse was widely known for his application of ultrasonic
techniques to study the behavior of electrons in metals, in
particular the phenomenon of superconductivity.
He received his BS from Bowdoin
College in 1943, his ScM from Brown University in 1947,
and his PhD from Brown in 1949. In 1966, he received an honorary
doctor of science degree from Bowdoin.
President Morse is survived by his sons, Robert W. Morse Jr.,
of Mill Valley, California, and James P. Morse, of Cleveland
Heights, Ohio; daughter Pamela Morse Moschetti, of North Falmouth,
Massachusetts; and five grandchildren. His wife, Alice C. Morse,
preceded him in death.
Reprinted from Case
Magazine, Winter 2001.
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