By BRENT MARTIN
St. Joseph Post
Missouri Western State University’s first president, Marvin O. Looney, has died.
Missouri Western reports Looney died September 29th in Mountain Home, Arkansas. He was 97.
“There are few figures, if any, more vital than Dr. Looney to the development of Missouri Western State University,” Missouri Western President, Elizabeth Kennedy, the University’s fifth president said in a written statement released by the university. “When he arrived in St. Joseph, a four-year regional university was little more than a dream. He gave that dream shape and substance, inspiring faculty, staff, students and the community to build MoWest into the vibrant university it remains today.”
Looney grew up in southwest Missouri and graduated from what then was Southwest Missouri State University in Springfield. He served in the Navy during World War II and began teaching and coaching at his alma mater, Gainesville High School.
Looney earned his Ph.D. from the University of Arkansas in 1961 and after stops at the University of Central Missouri, Kellogg Community College in Battle Creek, Michigan, and Mahoning Community College. Looney became president of Missouri Western Junior College in 1967, two years before the college became a four-year institution and moved to its current campus.
Looney establish Missouri Western as a four-year institution and saw it through accreditation. He oversaw construction of buildings on the St. Joseph campus. The M.O. Looney Fieldhouse bears his name.
He and his family–wife Dorsey and sons Doug, Bill and Chris–lived in the President’s House on campus until it was destroyed by fire on New Year’s Eve, 1981.
“We can say with certainty that he has been a good leader,” wrote Dr. Frances Flanagan in her history of the college. “If we recall the struggling–no, staggering–junior college in which Dr. Looney began his presidency and contrast that institution with the energetic and assured college in which he will end his presidential odyssey, we will see what he has accomplished.”
Mooney retired from MWSU in 1983, but returned to the workforce to lead the University of Alaska Anchorage, then served eight years as chancellor of Missouri State University-West Plains. He lived in Pontiac, Missouri.
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