Clifton R. Wharton Jr., who shattered racial barriers in a multifaceted career in education, international development and business, serving as the first Black president of a major, predominantly White university and later becoming the first person of color to lead a Fortune 500 company, died Nov. 16 at an assisted-living center in Manhattan. He was 98.
The cause was metastatic cancer, said his son Bruce Wharton.
As the Harvard-educated son of the first African American career diplomat to attain the ranks of minister and ambassador, Dr. Wharton seemed to move easily through the corridors of power.
Early in his career, as the first Black recipient of a doctorate in economics from the University of Chicago, he became a leading figure in agricultural and economic development, first in Latin America and later in Asia, where he lived for six years.
In 1969, after years as a prominent foundation executive, he was introduced as the next president of Michigan State University in East Lansing, making his first appearance before 77,000 people at a Spartans football game.
No Black person had held such a position before, and “people used to stop and stare,” Dr. Wharton later told the New York Times. “Even liberal professors would stare at me.”
After he took office in 1970, anti-Vietnam War protests broke out, as students confronted authorities and attempted to take over campus buildings. Windows were broken, fires were started, and several police officers were injured in violent clashes.
He wrote in his 2015 memoir, “Privilege and Prejudice,” that there were no protocols for handling massive student protests, so he developed his own. First, he decided that the university’s fundamental principles of free speech and academic expression were sacrosanct.
“Broken windows could be replaced,” he wrote, “but once the core values of academe were abandoned the damage would be irreparable.”
He drew a distinction between legal and illegal forms of dissent, while endeavoring to “conduct myself with calmness and dignity whatever the circumstances.”
Dr. Wharton dined with students to hear their concerns and decided to suspend classes for a day of “teach-ins” about the war in Vietnam, the role of the police and military – including campus ROTC groups – and the nature of protest in a civil society. His firm but conciliatory response was credited with quelling the uprising and returning the campus to normal.
During his eight-year tenure at Michigan State, Dr. Wharton expanded the university’s programs, launched a school of urban studies and made efforts to increase diversity among the faculty and student body. He was recognized by other college presidents as one of the top academic administrators in the country.
In 1978, he became chancellor of the State University of New York (SUNY), overseeing the largest college system in the country, with 64 campuses, about 350,000 students and a $2.5 billion budget. He helped lobby for reforms to decentralize a cumbersome administrative structure and give individual colleges more latitude in hiring and spending.
While working as a university leader, Dr. Wharton was making inroads in the corporate and nonprofit worlds. He became board chairman of the Rockefeller Foundation, served on the boards of the Aspen Institute and the Council on Foreign Relations and, for seven years, chaired the State Department’s Board for International Food and Agricultural Development.
In 1987, he was named chairman and chief executive of the Teachers Insurance and Annuity Association and College Retirement Equities Fund (TIAA-CREF), which managed the country’s largest private pension system and one of the largest life insurance companies.
He led the Fortune 500 company for six years, doubling its assets to $113 billion and reforming a standoffish corporate culture to make it more responsive to customers’ needs. Operators were instructed to answer the phone, “TIAA-CREF, at your service.”
A critic of the organization, onetime Northwestern University economics professor Marcus Alexis, told USA Today in 1991 that Dr. Wharton had been “phenomenally successful in redirecting TIAA-CREF.”
In one of his final public positions, Dr. Wharton became deputy secretary of state – the No. 2 position – at the start of the Clinton administration in 1993. He and Secretary of State Warren Christopher were a poor fit from the beginning.
Dr. Wharton was limited largely to administrative duties and felt shut out of a meaningful role in shaping policy in hot spots such as Bosnia and Haiti. After reports appeared in the press that he was “prickly” and slow to reorganize branches of the State Department, Dr. Wharton resigned after nine months, citing “the classic Washington practice of sustained anonymous leaks to the media.”
“I decided to resign,” he added, “rather than permit my effectiveness to be further eroded.”
Canary Islands to Harvard
Clifton Reginald Wharton Jr. was born Sept. 13, 1926, in Boston, the oldest of four children. His mother, who had a chemistry degree from Boston University, taught college-level Spanish and French.
His father began his career as a lawyer before taking the State Department’s Foreign Service exam in 1925. His first assignments were in the West African country of Liberia and in the Spanish-controlled Canary Islands. He later led the U.S. delegation in Romania and was named ambassador to Norway in 1961, the first African American career officer in the Foreign Service with that rank.
Dr. Wharton spent part of his childhood in the Canary Islands, off the northwestern coast of Africa, where he learned to speak Spanish and French, as well as English. He later moved to Boston, where he lived with his maternal grandmother – and, for the first time, encountered overt racism from school classmates.
He attended the prestigious Boston Latin School, a public school whose graduates include Benjamin Franklin and Ralph Waldo Emerson, before entering Harvard at age 16, as one of the few Black students on campus.
He worked for the college radio station and starred on the track team before leaving college in 1945, at the very end of World War II, to serve in the Army Air Forces with the Tuskegee Airmen, the all-Black military corps who trained in Alabama.
The war ended before he saw action, and Dr. Wharton returned to Harvard, receiving a bachelor’s degree in history in 1947. Considering a career as a diplomat, he became the first Black student at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, from which he received a master’s degree in 1948.
Instead of following his father to the State Department, he chose to work in international development, first with the American International Association for Economic and Social Development, a nonprofit founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller, who later became governor of New York and U.S. vice president.
After completing his doctorate at Chicago, Dr. Wharton worked for the Agricultural Development Council, another international nonprofit group started by the Rockefeller family. Based in Singapore and Malaysia, he led projects throughout Southeast Asia for six years, then became executive director and vice president with the organization in New York.
“Mankind is heterogeneous in race, religion and culture, and that’s the beauty of it,” Dr. Wharton told the Times in 1969. “The problem is living with this heterogeneity, and of not letting it destroy us.”
In later years, Dr. Wharton served on the boards of foundations and companies.
In addition to his son Bruce, survivors include his wife of 74 years, the former Dolores Duncan; a brother; and a sister. Another son, Clifton R. Wharton III, died in 2000.
In the early 1950s, Dr. Wharton was waiting to meet a friend in the lobby of the Willard Hotel in Washington. A White hotel clerk thought he was loitering and ordered him to leave the lobby and return through the service entrance.
Four decades later, the hotel had closed and was in need of money for renovations.
“To do that, they had to get some funds,” Dr. Wharton told Ebony magazine in 1991. “Guess where they got the funds? TIAA-CREF, and I’m the CEO of the company that loaned them the money. To me, that says something.”
