Lattie Coor Jr., former ASU president who expanded university into multiple campuses, dies at 89

Arizona State University’s former president, Lattie Coor Jr., died Thursday evening at the age of 89.

Coor was ASU’s 15th president, serving between 1990 and 2002. During his tenure, Coor helped launch Barrett, The Honors College and expanded ASU into a multicampus institution.

In a statement, ASU President Michael Crow said Coor laid the track for ASU to emerge as a unique institution of higher learning. After retiring as the university’s president, Coor founded the Center for the Future of Arizona, a nonprofit he called a “do-tank” instead of a think tank.

Colleagues there called him a visionary who believed in Arizona’s potential.

Coor grew up in Arizona and before coming back, served as President of the University of Vermont for more than a decade.

For more on Coor’s legacy and his time leading ASU, The Show spoke to Grady Gammage, Jr. — an attorney who has written books about the history of Phoenix and is the son of another former ASU President.

Full conversation

MARK BRODIE: Grady, when you think of Lattie Coor’s time as president of ASU, what comes to mind for you?

GRADY GAMMAGE: To me, Lattie became president of ASU at a critical time as ASU was becoming a credible national institution. And he, as much as anyone, was responsible for shepherding it into the regard it has today. It became a Research 1 university during Lattie’s tenure.

ASU is an institution that has evolved over time, kind of like the city of Phoenix has evolved. Started out small, started out not of much consequence, and began to explode as Phoenix and Arizona grew and exploded.

MARK BRODIE: What was Lattie’s vision for what ASU could and should be?

GRADY GAMMAGE: You know, it’s interesting. Lattie came to ASU from the University of Vermont, which is a very fine institution regarded as one of the public Ivies, but is a fairly stable school in a fairly bucolic setting in a fairly small state.

And I think Lattie came back to Arizona, because he grew up in Arizona, he went to NAU, but he came back to Arizona seeing the potential for ASU and for Phoenix to be really consequential.

And I think he shared that with my dad (Grady Gammage Sr.), who became president of ASU in the 1930s and realized Phoenix was on an extreme growth trajectory and ASU would try to match that. And with Michael Crow, who has furthered that vision of ASU as being big and important in the scheme of American universities, just as Phoenix could be big and important in the scheme of American cities.

MARK BRODIE: OK. So Lattie Coor, as you say, had this idea that ASU and Phoenix could be more consequential, could be bigger. How did he go about making ASU more into what he thought it should be? Because it’s one thing to think it, it’s another to actually do it.

GRADY GAMMAGE: Yeah, I think there really are two things. One is that Lattie reached out to the business community and the philanthropic community in Phoenix to a greater extent than had ever been done before. So he really launched the first major fundraising campaign.

And for a long time, ASU was content to sort of be funded by the Legislature, to mainly train teachers and businesspeople, to do some research but not at the level that American universities throughout the US had done.

So the first thing was Lattie reached out to people in Phoenix and got them to understand that giving money to ASU was the No. 1 thing they could do to further the interests of not just ASU, but of the city of Phoenix as a whole. And then the second thing I think he did is that he represented ASU on the national stage with other universities, with the AAU, and this Research 1 status, which is a big deal.

ASU has always been kind of the upstart institution versus the U of A, which was the land-grant school and which was regarded as more academically respectable. And Lattie put ASU on a trajectory to at least match that, arguably in today’s world maybe to have exceeded the reputation of the U of A.

I’m sure there are lots of people in Tucson who would resent that statement that I just made, but I’m a partisan, so excuse me.

Tom Story

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Arizona State University

MARK BRODIE: We’ll just let that one go for right now. So do you see sort of the growth of ASU and the growth of Phoenix moving sort of in concert? Like, could one have maybe happened without the other? Or both needed to happen at the same time for both to become what they’ve become?

GRADY GAMMAGE: I think it needed to sort of be simultaneous. It’s hard to have a big city without a big university. And for a very long time, ASU was kind of the only game in town.

Now there’s Grand Canyon University as well, which is one of the larger private schools in the U.S., so that’s good. You need a couple of them. And the Maricopa County Community College system is the largest community college system in the U.S.

So in today’s world, Phoenix has a pretty robust suite of higher education. That wasn’t always the case because Phoenix wasn’t big enough to deserve it. So I think you had to have both the city growing and then ASU playing catch-up, and then ASU growing a little ahead and then Phoenix playing catch-up for it to really become a major force in American life.

In my mind at least, it was really Lattie who got the notion of ASU having more than one campus started. I think the West campus idea probably predated Lattie’s tenure, but it really didn’t take off. And the Downtown campus and the East Valley (Polytechnic) campus, the embryo of all of those was in Lattie’s tenure at ASU.

MARK BRODIE: Was that part of his idea of also sort of helping this community grow — not just specifically Phoenix, but the whole Valley — grow into what he saw that it could become?

GRADY GAMMAGE: Yeah, that’s right. He used to use a phrase something like “one university in many places,” or something like that, because I think it became clear to Lattie and to others that the very spread-out nature of the metropolitan Phoenix area needed to have four-year institutions more than in just Tempe.

And those of us who are old Tempe people kind of weren’t sure about that for a while because we really didn’t want everything to be moved out of Tempe. But clearly, clearly the right choice.

And that’s part of what made ASU explode and become one of the largest, if not the largest university in the U.S., and what made Phoenix explode is that those resources were distributed in a way that allowed Mesa and Glendale and the West Valley, the East Valley and downtown (Phoenix) all to be part of this vision of a university and a city working together.

MARK BRODIE: Interesting. All right. We’ll have to leave it there. That is Grady Gammage Jr., a lawyer. His father was an ASU president. He’s a historian and an author, a whole bunch of other things. Grady, thanks so much for taking the time to help us remember former ASU president Lattie Coor. I really appreciate it.

GRADY GAMMAGE: Glad to do it. Lattie was a wonderful guy. I’m sorry he’s gone, but he did a lot.