GAINESVILLE, Fla. – E. T. York, chancellor emeritus of Florida’s state university system, has been awarded an honorary Doctor of Sciences degree by North Carolina State University.
In awarding the degree at the university’s December 17, 2003 graduation ceremonies, NCSU chancellor Marye Anne Fox cited York’s more than half-century of efforts to combat world hunger.
“After a career spanning more than 50 years, York is admired worldwide as an innovative educator, tireless humanitarian, and an effective advocate for the use of international agricultural development as a weapon against hunger and malnutrition,” Fox said.
“Growing up in the mountains of Northeast Alabama during the 1920s and 1930s, York witnessed the devastating effects of the Great Depression,” Fox continued. “The poverty and hunger he saw – along with the determination to make things better – shaped his values and strengthened his convictions in the power of education to change lives, and the power of science to help solve world problems.”
York became the University of Florida’s provost for agriculture in 1963, and later went on to become the university’s executive vice president and interim president. In 1975, he left UF for a five-year term as chancellor of the state university system. He retired early to devote himself full-time to working on problems of Third World development.
Throughout that time, York built a reputation as a champion of the effort to modernize agriculture in developing countries as a means of ending world hunger. He served as an advisor to six presidents – Kennedy, Johnson, Nixon, Ford, Carter and Reagan – and has served as a consultant for the U.S. Agency for International Development, the U.S. Department of State, the United Nations, private foundations and many foreign governments.
York also left his mark on UF, bringing the College of Agricultural and Life Sciences, the Cooperative Extension Service and the Florida Agricultural Experiment Station together under a single organization, the Institute of Food and Agricultural Sciences.
Before his long association with Florida’s state university system, York began his career at NCSU, serving as a professor in and later head of the university’s agronomy department.
This is not York’s first honorary doctorate. In 1982 he was awarded an honorary doctor of science degree by Auburn University, where he earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees and served as head of the extension service. UF awarded him an honorary doctorate in 1984. And in 1996, Ohio State University awarded York another honorary doctorate, recognizing that “his lifelong commitment to the sustainable use of natural resources gives hope to the quest to end hunger.”
In 1997, York was named a “Great Floridian” by the Florida History Associates of the Florida State Museum of History. The organization cited York as one of twelve individuals “who have made notable contributions to shaping the state of Florida as we know it today.”
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