A Lifetime of Acheivement AU Ag Alum Makes Mark on the World

By: Jamie Creamer

When E.T. York landed the job as director of the Alabama Cooperative Extension Service in 1959, he and his wife, Vam, were elated.

It meant they’d be coming “home,” to Auburn, to their alma mater, to the place they had met, courted and fallen in love 14 years earlier.

“When we got the opportunity to go back to Auburn, we thought we’d be there for life,” York recalls today. “We could happily have made it our home.”

But it was not to be. York’s career was on the fast track, and that track led away from Auburn.

In 1961, at the request of then–Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman, he took what was supposed to be a year’s leave from the Alabama Extension post to go to D.C. to serve as administrator of the Federal Extension Service. That one year turned into two, and then the two into a too-good-to-refuse job offer from the University of Florida that took the Yorks from Auburn for good and ultimately led to his position as chancellor of the State University System of Florida.

For York, it was all part of a stellar career that has earned him recognition worldwide as an outstanding educator, a think-outside-the-box supporter of the land-grant university system and a champion of the effort to modernize agriculture in developing countries as a means of ending world hunger.

In the 57 years since his first job as associate professor of agronomy at North Carolina State University, the Auburn alumnus has earned 98 resumé-worthy local, state, national and international honors and special recognitions.

Among the highlights: He’s been awarded honorary doctorates from four universities, including Auburn; he’s been tapped by the Florida Museum of History as one of an elite group of 12 “Great Floridians” who have made “notable contributions to shaping the state of Florida as we know it today”; he’s in the agricultural hall of honor in Alabama and hall of fame in Florida; and he was an adviser on development and hunger relief to every U.S. president from John F. Kennedy to Ronald Reagan.

Most recently, he was chosen to receive the Auburn University Alumni Association’s 2005 Lifetime Achievement Award.

Not bad for a Depression-era child from DeKalb County, Ala.

York’s first exposure to Auburn University came when, as a teen, he traveled from his home in the Valley Head community to the Loveliest Village for a state Future Farmers of America convention.

“I was quite impressed, and it became my dream to go to school at Auburn,” he says today from his office in Gainesville.

He realized that goal in 1939, enrolling in what was then Alabama Polytechnic Institute and going on to earn his bachelor’s in agricultural science in 1942. After a stint with the army in World War II, he returned to Auburn to work toward his master’s degree in soil science. It was then, in the spring of ’45, that he met senior Vam Cardwell of Evergreen, a business major, president of the Women’s Student Government Association and the girl of his dreams.

York received his master’s in 1946, married Vam and then was accepted into the post-graduate program at Cornell University. It was there that he had the opportunity to study under Richard Bradfield, a renowned soil scientist who, perhaps most important, had a tremendous interest in international agriculture, particularly in the food shortages that plague developing countries.

“He would go to these places and come back and talk to us in class about the food problems related to agriculture and hunger and the tremendous opportunity to fight global hunger by improving agricultural resources in these countries,” York says.

That planted the seed for York’s lifelong focus on strengthening the land-grant university system and its role in domestic and international agricultural development. His stellar career began at North Carolina State University where, after receiving his doctorate in soil science at Cornell, he was hired as associate professor of agronomy. He had worked up to the position of agronomy department head in 1956, when he left to work as regional director of the American Potash Institute.

Three years later, he got the Extension job in Alabama. Then came his two-year gig in Washington, and then the attractive offer from the University of Florida in Gainesville.

“We loved Auburn, but career-wise, it (Florida) was a clear step forward,” York says of the couple’s decision to move to the Sunshine State. “The Florida position was for much more responsibility—for all of agriculture at the university.”

At Florida, York was a mover and shaker. In 10 years, first as provost for agriculture and then as vice president for agricultural, natural and human resources, he overhauled agriculture as the university had known it. To better execute the land-grant institution’s threefold mission of teaching, research and service, he merged the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, the Florida Cooperative Extension Service and the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station to form the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.

He also established UF’s Center for Tropical Agriculture, which extended the institute’s international influence.

In 1974, York was named executive vice president and then interim president of UF. A year later, he accepted the position as chancellor of the State University System of Florida and held that post until 1980 when, at the age of 58, he took an early retirement to pursue full time his long-held interest in fighting global hunger by improving agricultural resources in developing countries.

Although his path led from Auburn, York and his wife—who, by the way, is retired from her own highly successful career in real estate—have not forgotten that their roots are in Auburn.

“Auburn University has meant a lot to us both,” he says.

Through the years, the couple has committed more than $1 million to Auburn, including a $300,000 planned gift to the AU College of Business, of which Mrs. York is a graduate; more than $600,000 to the E.T. and Vam York Endowed Fund for Excellence in International Agriculture, designed to support global experiences for faculty and graduate students; and $150,000-plus to establish the E.T. York Distinguished Lecturer Series, which for the past 24 years has brought nationally and internationally known leaders in agriculture and related disciplines to the Auburn campus to deliver public lectures and to visit with students and faculty.

Fittingly, the lectures in recent years have focused on sustainability and global hunger, with the list of lecturers including Nobel Peace Prize laureate Norman Borlaug. York was on hand and did the honors of introducing Borlaug to a packed auditorium.

These days, the spry, 83-year-old York still goes in to his office at the University of Florida almost daily.

“They give me an office and a secretary and the freedom to do what I want,” he says. “And I find plenty to do.”

Right now, for instance, he is highly involved in a spirited controversy surrounding the statewide governing body for the State University System of Florida.

Despite his long career as such an integral part of and leader in the higher education system in the Sunshine State, York insists his loyalties are equally divided between Auburn and Florida. Well, almost equally.

“Let’s just say that, in football, I pull for Auburn 364 days a year,” he says. “Be sure to specify that this relates to football. In other things, I pull for Auburn 365 days a year.”

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