The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture

BRANDT, JOSEPH AUGUSTUS (1899–1984).

The founding editor of the University of Oklahoma Press and then the university’s sixth president, Joseph Brandt was responsible for important innovations in the school’s administrative and educational practices. He was born in Seymour, Indiana, on July 26, 1899, to Theodore and Sophia Brandt. His mother, a German immigrant, taught herself English by studying a dictionary, and his father was one of those restless and wandering spirits typical of the settlement of the West. The Brandts moved first to Arkansas and then to the primitive wilds of Lone Wolf, Oklahoma. In 1901, at the mother’s insistence, the family moved briefly to the more civilized town of Tulsa. After more years of wandering, they returned to Tulsa permanently in 1911.

Young Joseph proved to be an exceptional student, graduating as valedictorian at Tulsa High School. His thoughts of becoming a lawyer or an engineer evaporated when he discovered journalism. Determined to follow that career, he enrolled at the University of Oklahoma in 1917. Despite his lack of money (he lived in a fraternity house basement and rose at 4:00 a.m. to start the furnace), Brandt had an illustrious career as an undergraduate. He graduated in 1921 with many honors, and encouraged and coached by several of his teachers, he won a Rhodes Scholarship to attend Oxford University.

Joe Brandt returned from England and in 1924 took a job with the Ponca City News. He soon moved to the Tulsa Tribune, hired as a reporter but quickly appointed city editor. There he met another reporter, a high-spirited, intelligent, and ambitious young woman named Sallye Little. They were married in 1928.

That same year, his life was changed by chance meeting with William Bennett Bizzell, the president of the University of Oklahoma. Bizzell was much impressed by the thirty-year-old Brandt and offered him a position in Norman as head of the school’s “print shop.” Bizzell had in mind both the need to better communicate with university alumni and to start a university publishing operation, a particular ambition of his. In partnership with a former classmate, Brandt quickly started the highly regarded Sooner Magazine. It was the second project, however, where Brandt found his calling. He started the University of Oklahoma Press more quickly than Bizzell had envisioned, and he emerged as an editor of extraordinary talent. His sympathy with authors, particularly young ones, and his astute editorial suggestions, combined with his informal and gregarious manner, made him one of the most popular figures on the campus. His office was soon a center of sociability and intellectual activity.

In 1938 Brandt left Oklahoma. Driven by his growing family’s need for money and by the dire economic condition of the state during the Great Depression, he accepted the editorship of the Princeton University Press. It was probably the happiest situation he and his wife would ever know.

When Bizzell announced his retirement, there was organized a determined effort to bring Brandt back to Norman as the next president. Lloyd Noble, Brandt’s old acquaintance from the class of 1921 and now a University Regent, was relentless in pressuring him to return. Finally, with many misgivings and despite Sallye’s despair at leaving Princeton, he surrendered. He would always regard it as the worst decision of his life.

In 1941 Joseph Brandt came to the presidency of the University of Oklahoma determined to institute reforms that he had advocated since those early days at the Press. Almost as if he knew he would not last long as president, he immediately embarked on measures to modernize the institution. Among the major changes were the elimination of the old hierarchy of deans and department heads. These had held absolute power and enjoyed practically lifetime appointments. After occupying the presidency for a scant five weeks, Brandt asked the Regents to limit headships (now to be called “chairs”) and deanships to three-year terms “preferably not to succeed themselves.” The Regents agreed unanimously to this bombshell. Next, he advocated the creation of a “senate” elected by the faculty to replace the Administrative Council of deans in policy-making. Then he took steps that his successor, George Lynn Cross, would later say “introduced the concept of academic freedom and tenure” to the university. Brandt advocated and worked to establish a statewide retirement system for teachers. He took the first concrete steps to create the University of Oklahoma Foundation, an institution to organize and manage private donations of money to the school.

His most controversial achievement was an outgrowth of his belief that too much of the university’s effort was in vocational training and not enough in intellectual adventure and experimentation. He created the University College, a two-year home for all incoming students where they were free to experiment intellectually before choosing a major. A proponent of research, he laid the groundwork for the University’s Research Institute. He also established the Research Professorships (later named in honor of George Lynn Cross).

Because of his radical reforms and his strategy of implementing them without consultation, Brandt was the subject of vehement opposition, principally by the older deans and their allies. A squabble with Gov. Robert Kerr over budgetary matters rendered his position untenable. When offered the editorship of the University of Chicago Press in 1943, Brandt resigned the presidency and moved to Chicago. In 1945 he was lured to the presidency of the Henry Holt publishing house in New York City, and four years later he accepted a professorship in the University of California, Los Angeles, where he founded the institution’s Graduate School of Journalism. Joseph A. Brandt retired in 1966 and moved to Laguna Hills, California. He died on November 1, 1984, at the age of eighty-five.

David W. Levy