June Henton

June Henton, dean of the College of Human Sciences at Auburn University, is visiting a refugee camp.

This refugee camp is full of students and located on AU’s Cater Lawn, but the guards — ROTC students — are real. So are the makeshift tents and the rationed food, enough for four people for two meals. The food is distributed only to the females, as in a refugee camp, because women always make sure the children eat. Today, the dinner menu consists solely of tortillas flavored with crumbly dried kudzu, cooked on a little energy-efficient stove. Tomorrow morning, the menu will be beans.

Henton is AU’s longest serving dean, with twenty-five years at the helm of her college. Among her accomplishments is collaborating with the United Nations to raise awareness on college campuses about the problem of world hunger.

“Solving world hunger — that’s the quintessential complex problem,” she muses. “People think it’s a problem that can’t be solved.”

The tenure of college deans is about seven years on average, and Henton passed that mark almost two decades ago. Nobody is lobbying for her to step down.

“As dean of the College of Human Sciences, Dr. Henton has built academic programs that have a reputation throughout the state of Alabama, the nation, and the world,” says AU provost Mary Ellen Mazey, Henton’s boss. “The university is very fortunate to have such a high caliber dean with an international reputation for her work.”

Lee Cannon, a cookbook author and former television host who served under four deans teaching home economics at Auburn, agrees emphatically.

“I’ve known her since the very beginning. I’m a great admirer of June’s. If I had to think of something to criticize her I would have a very hard time,” says Cannon, who taught in the College of Human Sciences before she retired. “I think Auburn is very lucky to have her. She certainly has put this school on the map.” Cannon now serves on Henton’s college advisory board and calls the dean a friend.

Although Henton is low key, soft-spoken and rarely takes the spotlight, she has gained a reputation for innovative programs and thinking with a global perspective – not bad for a woman who spent her youth on her father’s ranch near tiny Hominy, Oklahoma., northwest of Tulsa.

Yet, Henton will tell you, the key vision guiding her college for the last two decades is “globalization.” During the late 1980s, when she came to Auburn from Oregon, some Alabamians acted as though the world stopped at the Chattahoochee River. But nationwide the discussion was how college graduates could operate in a global economy, and Henton was listening. She put together an advisory board with widespread connections.

“They really got serious about changing the curricula,” she remembers. “They identified what kind of knowledge was important to have a broader perspective, and they wanted to make sure our graduates had had the opportunity to travel abroad.”

Some of Henton’s best-known initiatives evolved from that drive for global awareness. One thing just seemed to lead to another.

Henton’s involvement with the World Food Programme, for example, came out of another College of Human Sciences program, the International Quality of Life Awards. The awards, established in 1994, honored people and partnerships making significant contributions to quality of life both locally and internationally. Past recipients have included South Africa’s Archbishop Desmond Tutu, former U.S. Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, and more than one Nobel laureate.

“The college’s advisory board was focused on international programs, with members who had lived and worked overseas,” Henton recalls. “Most were not from Auburn, so their concern was that most people don’t know where Auburn is. That is why we decided to have the awards ceremony in New York City at the United Nations building.”

Henton had friends at the U.N. The next piece fell into place because one of the college’s advisory board members was an adviser to the U.N.’s World Food Programme, which has headquarters in Rome but a marketing office in New York City.

“Someone was interested in a student-run hunger campaign and wondered if I would take a look at what they were doing,” Henton says. “All they were thinking about was a Web site with a nineteen-cent campaign — at that time it took nineteen cents a day to feed a child. They were just planning on raising funds from the number of clicks on the page.”

Auburn University was soon on board as the World Food Programme’s first academic partner. That was in 2004. Now, more than one hundred fifty universities are involved in the Universities Fighting World Hunger coalition she created. 

“I said yes, not knowing what it would entail,” Henton remembers. “But we have to get a handle on feeding people and the very real, shameful position we are in of having twenty-five thousand people a year die from hunger when there is enough food.”

As Henton enters AU’s mock refugee camp, she hardly looks like a crusader. Although she is in her late sixties or perhaps early seventies, she is slender with an unlined face, medium-brown hair and dressed in a slim skirt, low heels and a leather jacket. She is brisk, precise and self-contained.

The refugee camp falls into the category of “consciousness raising,” because refugees often are hungry. The simulated refugee camp is a project of AU’s Committee of 19, a student group with representation from every school and college on campus that directs War on Hunger efforts at AU and in the community. Students apply for the committee, and behind every one with an official position are dozens of volunteers. Their model is to raise awareness of hunger, followed by consciousness raising, money raising, and finally advocacy. Not only have they slept in a refugee camp overnight, they have marched to Montgomery and back.

“Every discipline has a role to play, and everybody has a contribution to make,” Henton says. Involvement in the World Hunger efforts is “an absolutely life-changing experience for a lot of our students here.”

Henton says the idea is for students not only to better understand the issues, but to think about long-term solutions instead of short-term crisis intervention.  

“It has to be long-term, generation after generation,” she says. “We know hunger can be solved in our time, but there is a lack of political will. We just have to bring along the next generation, getting young people informed and committed to a cause.”

Universities have never banded together to collectively put their talents to work on global issues, Henton says. Recently, Roger Beachy, director of the National Institute on Food and Agriculture, cited Auburn’s comprehensive approach as an example of how the academic community can collaboratively address important issues facing the world.

“AU fisheries has done a phenomenal job over the years, but the rest of us have been bench players, observers more than activists,” Henton says. The AU Department of Fisheries and Allied Aquaculture has an international presence through its International Center for Aquaculture created in the 1970s. It provides assistance to developing countries.

So how did that little girl from Hominy—her name was June Markum then—become not only a college dean but a leading figure in the War on Hunger? Henton isn’t the sort of person who bubbles with anecdotes about herself, but she says that growing up she always loved school. Her brother was the first in the family to go to college.

“The options were usually, ‘Will I work or won’t I work?’” Henton remembers. “If a women worked, she was probably a teacher or a nurse. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, making a living was a challenge, and college was an additional financial burden. People did very well without a college degree.” But Henton’s mother was her role model, and she set high standards for the family. So Henton packed her bags for Oklahoma State, a land-grant university not too far from her hometown. There, Henton studied family social science, which she describes as the study of relationships and how they develop and change over time, with one of the key relationships being the family unit. That’s where she met her husband, Richard Henton.

Together, the Hentons went to graduate school at the University of Nebraska and then pursued doctoral studies at the University of Minnesota, graduating in 1970. Out of the six children in the Markum family, Henton says she’s the renegade, the only one who settled far from home. The Hentons, an academic couple, took positions first at Texas Tech, then in 1979 moved on to the University of Oregon in Corvallis. Henton was an associate dean and department chair, and her husband was a professor of interior design.

“We were a dual career couple until Oregon State,” Henton says. “My husband had a stroke a couple of years later; it affected his speech center and took him out of his teaching career.”

After that, Henton says, Richard played an essential role as their two children grew up and also “taking care of me.” Their son now works for PBS in Alexandria, Virginia., and their daughter is in Huntsville. Both are AU graduates who married Auburn natives, which means she gets to see her two grandchildren often.

“She doesn’t neglect her family for anything,” says her friend Lee Cannon. “That’s one thing I like about her, too.”

When Henton was recruited to come to Auburn in 1985, the college had fewer than five hundred students. Today, the College of Human Sciences has some twelve hundred students in three departments — consumer affairs, human development and family studies and nutrition, dietetics and hospitality management.

The consumer affairs department includes interior design, applied design and applied merchandising. Students in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies typically go into helping professions, and if they get a master’s degree provide marriage and family therapy. The Department of Nutrition, Dietetics and Hospitality Management is a hybrid, with nutrition students typically preparing for careers in medicine or physical therapy and dietetics students going on to sit for the Registered Dietitian exam.

The hotel and restaurant management program showcases another groundbreaking Henton initiative: a partnership with Atlanta-based West Paces Hotel Group, a luxury chain with hotels and resorts around the world. AU’s hotel and restaurant management students get hands-on experience in the “lab” across the street from campus — the Auburn University Hotel and Conference Center. West Paces employees with stellar credentials double as instructors, and students can move on to internships at properties in New York City, or Telluride, or Bali, or Singapore, or….well, you get the idea.

What most local people don’t know is that West Paces got its start in Auburn, with the hotel and conference center as its beta site. They also may not know that West Paces is headed by Horst Schulze, one of the luminaries in the hospitality firmament. It just so happens that Schulze serves on Henton’s college advisory board and along the way became a friend. That’s typical, Lee Cannon says; when people work with Henton on something, they always end up as a good friend. And since Henton knew Schulze, she recognized an opportunity for Auburn.

“This hotel was dedicated in 1988, and I was always frustrated it was owned by the developers and had no connection with the university,” Henton says. “In 2000 I started hearing rumors that AU was buying it. Horst had left Ritz-Carlton (where he was long-time president) and was in a non-compete agreement. I went to him and asked if he was interested in managing the hotel. He was, and he brought along Ritz-Carlton’s best people.”

Schulze was satisfying a desire to mentor young restaurateurs and hoteliers, and Henton was laying the foundation for a hotel and restaurant management program that may eventually rival the industry’s best-known program at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

“Oh, we’ll exceed Cornell,” Henton says confidently. “Their goal is to be the biggest. Our goal is to be the best.”

Another Henton initiative with a decidedly global perspective is the College of Human Sciences’ campus in Ariccia, Italy, seventeen miles south of Rome. Auburn has always offered study-abroad opportunities, but Henton, her advisory board, and the College of Human Sciences went a step further. They created a permanent campus in Ariccia, where students stay in the Palazzo Chigi, the summer home of a wealthy Roman family that was renovated by Gian Lorenzo Bernini.

The campus opened in 2002, and every fall nineteen undergraduates and one graduate student take up residence for a term. In the spring another group comes, with a third group during the summer semester. The students take excursions south to Naples and the Amalfi coast and north to Tuscany, Florence and Milan.

“Anzio Beach (where the Allies landed during World War II) is only thirty miles away,” Henton says. “I think students develop a better appreciation for American history there than here.”

Marilyn Bradbard, the campus’ executive director, runs the program from Auburn. Students from all different disciplines in the College of Human Sciences participate, and the program is open to students from any major on campus if space is available.

“I thought it was out of our reach,” Henton says. “The university was not very internationally focused at that time, and I didn’t think we could establish a permanent campus by ourselves.”

Henton says she expected Auburn to be a five-year stop for the family. What kept her invested and excited, she says, was the fact that she was given the autonomy to do innovative things. And which innovative initiative makes her most proud?

“All of the above,” she says. “They came at different times. Someone opens a door for you, and you take advantage of the opportunity.”

That’s actually a little too modest, Lee Cannon maintains.

“She’s been given the freedom, but she’s also created the situations,” Cannon says. “Faculty and administration always agreed with her because she was right. She put Auburn on the map.”