Orin Benton Graff : personal and professional dimensions of a progressive professor of educational administration and supervision

Orin Benton Graff (1901-1980) served as a University of Tennessee professor for 28 years, plus nine years as an active professor emeritus. He was founding head of the university's Department of Educational Administration and Supervision and served as acting dean of the College of Education. The university named him among its first 10 distinguished service professors. Graff's mentor at The Ohio State University was Boyd H. Bode, noted pragmatist and philosophical spokesman for progressive education. Studies with Bode and others led him to an unusual but highly effective approach as a professor. He guided doctoral students toward development of intellectualized personal value systems by combining emphasis on philosophy with practical, "real-world" experiences. An extraordinary number of his graduates made their own marks in educational administration. Graff's life provided a "prism of history" for new eras of development in educational administration and at The University of Tennessee. He was an early leader in the National Conference of Professors of Educational Administration (NCPEA) and the Southern States Cooperative Program in Educational Administration (SSCPEA). He became a counterrevolutionist voice in the "theory movement," opposing his profession's move toward logical positivism; in his writings and in a 1960 NCPEA "great debate," he asserted that human values are an inseparable part of theory. At The University of Tennessee, he was a campus leader during a period when student enrollment grew from approximately 3,600 to 20,000. He was instrumental in many aspects of this growth, particularly in developing graduate education and in moving the university toward equal opportunity for minority and women students. Graff's style as a professor reflected unusual integration of personal and professional dimensions. He combined a love of academic pursuits with a genuine sense of populism. He taught and modeled incisive humanist thinking as an intellectual foundation for qualities such as warmth, humanitarianism, and self-assurance. Along with highly personalized aspects, his career demonstrated many guideposts for effective administration and teaching at the graduate level. A revisiting of his emphasis on intellectualized personal value systems appears particularly pertinent to educational leadership, in addition to enduring as a legacy through the work of his students.