E. Travis York, Jr. (July 4, 1922 – April 15, 2011) was an American agronomist, professor, university administrator, agricultural extension administrator, and U.S. presidential adviser. York was a native of Alabama, and earned his bachelor's, master's and doctorate degrees in agricultural sciences. He served as the director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service, the administrator of the federal Extension Service, the interim president of the University of Florida, and the chancellor of the State University System of Florida.
Early life and education
York was born and raised in the Valley Head community in DeKalb County in northeast Alabama, and came of age during the Great Depression. After graduating from high school in 1939, York enrolled at Alabama Polytechnic Institute (API) (now Auburn University) in Auburn, Alabama, and earned his Bachelor of Science degree in agricultural science in 1942. After completing his World War II service as a captain in the U.S. Army field artillery, York returned to API to continue his education in soil science. During this time, he met and married Vermelle "Vam" Cardwell of Evergreen, Alabama, a business administration undergraduate and president of the API Women's Student Government Association.
York graduated from API with a Master of Science degree in agronomy and soils in 1946, and was accepted into the doctoral program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. At Cornell, he studied under nationally renowned soil scientist Richard Bradfield, who imparted to York his passionate interest in how food shortages contributed to chronic hunger in much of the developing world. Much of York's later career would focus on ways to harness the resources of the U.S. land-grant educational system to alleviate world hunger.
After finishing his doctor of philosophy degree at Cornell, York was hired as an associate professor of agronomy at North Carolina State University in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he would later assume the chairmanship of the Department of Agronomy. In 1956, he left North Carolina State to work as a regional director for the Potash Institute.
Extension service
In 1959, York returned to his alma mater to succeed the retiring P. O. Davis as director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service in Auburn, Alabama. York remains the youngest person to serve as Alabama Extension director.
York's two-year tenure as extension director, though brief, was considered a watershed event in Alabama Extension history, reflected in the laudatory remarks in contemporary Alabama newspapers, including the Andalusia Star-News, which described his brief directorship as "a new and enlightened era" in Alabama farming. York's vision of the Alabama Extension was that of an organization committed to the economic betterment of the state as a whole, rather than only to the farming sector or to urban Alabamians with lawn and gardening problems.
He was a vocal supporter of cooperation with other groups, calling on extension educators to "make these other groups members of our own team rather than [to] compete with them by attempting to do the total job by ourselves." Perceiving the need for a highly trained and qualified staff, York developed a liberal study program to allow extension professionals to qualify for leave to pursue advanced degrees while earning full pay. York also established a practice of replacing vacancies only with professionals with advanced degrees—a policy credited with greatly enhancing the quality of Alabama Extension programming.
York is remembered for ending the long-standing public perception that the Alabama Extension was hopelessly entangled in local, state and even national politics. One of his earliest actions as the new Alabama Extension director was to remove the organization from partisan politics. He invited the senior county extension agents to a dinner, all of whom had actively used their positions in state and local politics, and announced to his shocked audience that anyone who used his position for political gain or influence in the future would be summarily fired.
In 1961, at the request of U.S. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, York took a planned leave of absence as director of the Alabama Extension to serve as the administrator for the federal Extension Service (now the Cooperative State Research, Education and Extension Service) in Washington, D.C., and became the youngest person to ever hold the position.