News » Frank Newman Dies at 77

Frank Newman, Who Shaped Education,
Dies at 77 By Karen W. Arenson

The higher education civic responsibility movement has lost an important leader. Frank Newman (1927-2004) , one of Campus Compact's founders, died on May 30. This obituary appeared in Friday's New York Times.

Frank Newman, Who Shaped Education, Dies at 77 By KAREN W. ARENSON

Published: June 4, 2004

Frank Newman, the former president of the Education Commission of the States, who helped to shape state education policy in the 1980's and 1990's and prodded colleges and universities to respond to a rapidly changing society, died on Saturday in Providence, R.I. He was 77 and lived in Jamestown, R.I.

The cause was melanoma, his son Kenneth C. Newman said.

A social engineer who often worked behind the scenes, Mr. Newman pushed colleges to be more flexible in responding to a changing population of part-time and older students and to make greater use of technology in teaching. As others bemoaned the growing presence of for-profit companies in higher education, Mr. Newman argued that they should be encouraged if they served students well. And he tried to help states develop accountability systems to judge whether their schools and colleges were performing well.

Many of the recommendations that seemed radical when he first made them were commonplace by the end of his career.

"No American has had a greater impact on education in the last 30 years than Frank Newman," said Arthur E. Levine, president of Teachers College at Columbia University.

Together with the presidents of Stanford, Brown and Georgetown, Mr. Newman founded Campus Compact in 1985 to foster community service by college students. Today, more than 900 colleges and universities participate in its programs.

John G. Sperling, the founder of the University of Phoenix, the large for-profit university, credits Mr. Newman with helping him realize that if he wanted to offer a program for working adults, he would need to look beyond traditional colleges. In his memoir, "Rebel With a Cause," Mr. Sperling said Mr. Newman explained that "educational bureaucracies are dedicated to the status quo" and that he would need to find a financially pressed institution willing to take a risk. "In a minor miracle," Mr. Sperling said, Mr. Newman found him just such an institution. Two years
later, in 1976, Mr. Sperling founded Phoenix.

Mr. Newman was one of the education reformers chosen to receive part of Walter H. Annenberg's $500 million grant to improve education in America in 1993.

"Annenberg's message was to find 10, 20, 30 active reformers," said Vartan Gregorian, president of the Carnegie Corporation, who at the time was president of Brown University and Mr. Annenberg's adviser. "Frank was one of them. And as president of the Education Commission of the States he was also central in propagating the findings of all the others."

Mr. Newman's route to a career in education policy was circuitous. Born in 1927, he was one of three children of Frank and Dorothy Newman. His father was a manager for A.T.& T., his mother an elementary school teacher.

He grew up in Mamaroneck, N.Y. After failing to win entry to the Naval Academy, he arranged to graduate a semester early from high school and enlisted in the Navy on his 17th birthday, but was still in officer training at Brown University when the war ended. Three years later, he returned to Brown, where he earned a second bachelor's degree (in electrical engineering) and met Lucile Fanning, who became his wife; she is an emeritus professor at Brown University.

She survives him, as do their three sons, Kenneth, of Jamestown; James, of Cambridge, Mass.; and Michael, of Chicago; a brother, James, of Hilton Head, S.C.; and two grandsons.

In 1949, Mr. Newman entered business. He worked first for the Honeywell Regulator Company in New York, and then for Beckman Instruments in California. He also earned a master's degree in business administration from Columbia University. (He later earned a Ph.D. in history from Stanford.)

He turned his life upside down in 1966, running unsuccessfully for Congress in California as a Republican antiwar candidate. Then he was hired to direct public relations at Stanford. While there, he initiated a series of meetings with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare concerning national education policy, according to an account of an interview with him last month by his grandson Gage Slaughter Newman. In 1969, the H.E.W. secretary, Robert H. Finch, asked him to lead a task force on reform in higher education.

The Newman Report, as it was known, called for an "intensive national effort" to develop an alternative higher education system, including new forms of off-campus education and ways to give credit for experiences outside of the classroom concepts he returned to in his later work. It also criticized the low college-graduation rates and suggested that not all students should attend college at 18.

"If you read the book now, it seems trivial, because it is describing higher education exactly as it is today," said Dr. Levine of Teachers College. "But it wasn't then, and it sounded radical."

Educators denounced the report. But H.E.W. officials commissioned Mr. Newman to lead a second task force on reform in 1971. Three years later, he was named president of the University of Rhode Island, a post he held until 1983, when he became a fellow at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. In 1985, he became president of the Education Commission of the States, in Denver.

By then, political officials and educators were trying to respond to "A Nation at Risk," a 1983 study attacking the quality of American education. Mr. Newman, an early advocate of standards-based learning, worked on strategy with state legislators and governors, including Bill Clinton.

After leaving the Education Commission in 1999, Mr. Newman remained a maverick voice on higher education. He taught at Brown and at Teachers College and directed the Futures Project: Policy for Higher Education in a Changing World, at Brown. He also lectured widely.

The Frank Newman Scholarship fund has been established by National Compact to expand opportunities for outstanding students who has financial need, and who advances the civic mission of American higher education.