Ed Bishop, irreplaceable rural voice, dies at 90

Funeral services were held today for Ed Bishop, a voice for rural America at the highest levels of higher education. He died Saturday at 90 in Durham, N.C. Bishop was the first chancellor of the University of Maryland at College Park, and was later president of the University of Arkansas and the University of Houston systems.

"He spent his life working to make life better in rural communities," Bill Bishop, no kin, writes in the Daily Yonder. "There isn’t anyone like Ed Bishop in the U.S. today — someone who can command the respect of presidents but understands completely the way people live in the poorest community."

Bishop's career in higher education began with his bachelor's degree at Berea College in Kentucky, "an institution whose motto, 'God has made of one blood all peoples of the earth,' became a part of his life," said his obituary, which directed memorial gifts there. After earning a master's at the University of Kentucky, he became a professor and then head of agricultural economics at North Carolina State University, then vice president of the University of North Carolina.

He served on many boards and commissions, including President Carter's Commission on an Agenda of the Eighties and his Advisory Commission on Balanced Growth and Economic Development, and President Nixon's White House Task Force on Rural Development. He was executive director of President Johnson's National Advisory Commission on Rural Poverty, which produced a report that Bill Bishop says is still "the federal government's most ambitious plan for driving poverty from the countryside." (Read more)

"Ed married a life-long commitment to the 'people and places left behind" with an uncompromising intellect and the most rigorous analytic standards," said the website of MDC Inc., a North Carolina nonprofit he worked with after retirement. "He was a champion for rural people while remaining unsentimental about the prospects of rural areas in a globalizing economy."