Orange Alert

Kathryn Morgan

Biography

Morgan Kathryn

Kathryn Morgan earned her Ph.D. at Stanford in 1946 under Uspensky, with her dissertation entitled Representation of Binary Quadratic Forms by Quaternary Quadratic Forms, and she then joined the SU faculty that year. She was promoted to Associate Professor in 1957, and was deputy chairman from 1955 to the middle 1970s. During Kibbey's chairmanship Kay was deputy chair for lower division courses: for example, she organized uniform common finals for all courses that did not have a chair, chose textbooks for low-level courses, made an outline for any new text, ran registration, saw students who had problems with their instructors, and tried to help graduate students with their teaching. She did anything needed with freshman-sophomore classes.

She served successively as treasurer, program director, vice-president, and then president of the local AAUP chapter, and in a variety of offices at the faculty club culminating in its presidency one year. She served in the University Senate for a number of years and was on the Senate's budget and faculty services committees. The last committee wrote a list of many pages of data about institutions, decided on a list of 15 or so universities comparable to SU, and presented the information to the Senate budget committee, arguing for raises. Kay collected about $800 from the Syracuse faculty to get the faculty salary survey started, and Eric Lawson took the sum to the AAUP national meeting. This has grown to the detailed annual salary survey done now by the AAUP. Years ago the University contributed 9% to TIAA and the individual faculty member contributed 6%. She was instrumental in changing this to 11% by the University and 4% by the individual. Kay retired in 1982.

I last saw Kay at the International Congress of Mathematicians in 1986, where she was her usual warm self, asked about my family and attended the rodeo with Nancy Cole. Ann Kibbey, an associate professor of English at the University of Colorado, wrote me on June 18, 2002: "Kay Morgan was a kind of role model for me."

Sources: Recollections of Otway Pardee and of Kay herself.

Otway Pardee told me on February 11, 2010 that Kay died on February 5.

Phil Church 6/ 4/02, 6/19/02, 2/11/10