The Faculty History Project documents faculty members who have been associated with the University of Michigan since 1837. Key in this effort is to celebrate the intellectual life of the University. This Faculty History Website is intended as a component of the effort to document the extraordinary academic achievements of Michigan’s faculty in building and sustaining one of the world’s great universities. It provides access to a comprehensive database of information concerning the thousands of faculty members who have served the University of Michigan.
Find out more.
The Bentley Historical Library serves as the official archives for the University.
Memoir
Regents' Proceedings 16
James A. Lewis, Professor of Education and former Vice-President for Student Affairs, has completed his retirement furlough and is retiring from the active faculty at the age of sixty-seven.
Professor Lewis was born and schooled in Owosso, attended Michigan State, and earned his baccalaureate from Central Michigan. His subsequent involvement in state education proved unusually diverse. He taught school in Cass City and Dowagiac, served as elementary school and high school principal in the latter city, earned a master's degree from the University in 1938, and then returned to Dowagiac as Superintendent of Schools. Serving later as school superintendent in St. Joseph and in Dearborn, he came to the University at the end of 1953 as Director of the Bureau of School Services. In the following year he was appointed to the newly created post of Vice President for Student Affairs. Awarded a Doctor of Education degree from Harvard University in 1956, he was in the same year appointed Professor of Education here. At the end of 1964, he retired from the vice-presidency to devote himself full time to the School of Education.
As principal administrative officer for student affairs, Professor Lewis dealt with early phases of the demand for accelerated change, reckoning genially and flexibly with pressures like those for relaxing dormitory rules and for eliminating ethnic uniformity in student associations. He concurrently oversaw, in a fostering spirit, an agglomeration of University functions not always clearly rationalized or organically related. In the School of Education, his long practical experience in a diversity of school offices lent authority and scope to his teaching and his counsel.
Professor Lewis' good humor and forbearance notably assisted this institution during a period of difficult transitions. The University Regents bid him cordial thanks and Godspeed as they confer on him the title for which he has now become eligible, Professor Emeritus of Education.