Raymond Allen Pearson was an American agricultural administrator and educator.
Background
Raymond Allen Pearson was born on April 9, 1873 in Evansville, Vanderburgh County, Indiana, United States. He was the third son and third child of native New England parents of the seventh generation, Leonard and Lucy Small (Jones) Pearson. The father's career was in railroad service, in which he rose to executive position. Young Pearson's boyhood summers were spent on an uncle's farm in Iowa.
Education
Following his older brothers, Edward Jones and Leonard, to Cornell, where another uncle, George W. Jones, was a professor of mathematics, Raymond Allen Pearson enrolled in the agricultural college, specializing in the developing branch of dairy industry. He received a B. S. in Agriculture in 1894 and the following year, as a graduate assistant, began advanced study that led to a master's degree in 1899.
Career
Raymond Allen Pearson's professional advancement was rapid. Following formative experience as assistant chief of the dairy division of the United States Department of Agriculture (1895 - 1902) and in the management of a commercial dairy laboratory (1902 - 1903), he organized and headed a separate department of dairy industry at Cornell (1903 - 1908). Administration, however, appealed to him as a career more than teaching, and with the support of state farm organizations he was appointed New York Commissioner of Agriculture, a post he held from April 1908 to February 1912. His administration was characterized by vigorous enforcement of regulatory acts and understanding cooperation with research and extension agencies. On behalf of the state government he also investigated cooperative marketing in Europe; his report Agricultural Organizations in European Countries (1914) constituted a substantial bulletin. Meanwhile Pearson had been elected to the presidency of Iowa State College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts, then entering upon a period of transition and expansion. The young executive's enthusiasm for education in applied science, his tireless energy, and his affable and democratic manner won immediate support on campus and in the state.
In the decade and a half of his service (1912 - 1926), Raymond Allen Pearson brought the college to the front rank of land-grant institutions. National leadership came with his influence on agricultural legislation and college policies as Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for war production, 1917 - 1918, and as chairman for seventeen years (1919 - 1935) of the executive committee of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges. The postwar agricultural depression produced pressure for curtailment and consolidation which, together with personal rivalry between the heads, brought unsettling contention between Iowa's state college and its university. Finally a jurisdictional impasse between Pearson and the finance committee of the central board of education made his position untenable, and he resigned to accept the presidency of the University of Maryland. This uniquely organized institution, a recent consolidation of old and new professional schools in Baltimore with the land-grant college at College Park, had not become fully unified when the depression years brought crippling reduction in state support.
In spite of such handicaps, the nine years of Pearson's administration (1926 - 1935) showed appreciable material and scholastic advances. Personal and "service" jealousies, however, especially between the general and agriculture colleges, created an opposing faction of staff and alumni (including all of the university's fourteen deans and directors) which influenced a majority of the regents to ask for Pearson's resignation. He was offered an advisory position of dubious dignity and permanence which he rejected for service with the federal Farm Security Administration. He entered the new field with characteristic energy, but, worn with administrative cares increased by what many of his friends felt to be an over-conscientious devotion to details, he had a serious physical breakdown from which he never fully recovered.
Raymond Allen Pearson died of a sudden heart attack at his home on February 13, 1939 in Hyattsville, Maryland. His ashes were deposited in the Iowa State College cemetery.
Achievements
Connections
Raymond Allen was married to Fanny Alice (Dunsford) Pearson. They had two children. A son had died before him.