Terry Cooney was a professor of History and Dean from 1976-2006.

An American intellectual historian, Terry came to the university in 1976, soon became a member of the Faculty Senate, served as Associate Dean for a time and then, having returned to the faculty, agreed somewhat reluctantly when President Susan Pierce called upon him to become Dean of the Faculty. He left in 2006, and he is still a Dean, though now of a much larger campus.

He credits the Board of Trustees in the 1970’s with the vision to raise the academic quality and the profile of the university from a regional to a national level. But it had to be done on a low budget. (At one point the debt amounted to 110% of the endowment). Ray Bell, financial VP in the Phibbs years, actually managed to move some of the tuition income into the endowment. No building was done for 20 years.

The push for academic rigor led to the decision to close the off-campus extension program where quality could not be controlled, although that involved losing the $250,000 revenue brought in by the satellite campuses. It meant the transformation of the faculty, now recruited from across the country (the idea, often expressed, was that “We have to hire people who are better than we are”), and then the transformation of the student body, also now recruited on a national scale.

Finally, in the 1990’s, the budget could sustain the physical transformation of the campus. We have a relatively small campus for the size of the student body, and the redesigning called for coherence – getting rid of the car traffic from around the dorms and the quad, extending the quads to get the “long center” and building a walkway that tied the library at one end of the campus to the fieldhouse at the other.

For the transformation of the University over those thirty years Terry gives credit to the Board of Trustees which made the right decisions at the right time, to Bill Weyerhauser who led the Board brilliantly, and to a series of presidents who provided stability in leadership. Each president served for a substantial time; none left Puget Sound to become president somewhere else – a remarkable record.