Professor Emeritus Vincent McGuire, proponent of school accountability, dies at 87

Professor Emeritus Vincent McGuire, a long-time member of the COE faculty and outspoken proponent of school accountability, died Sept. 4 in Gainesville. He was 87.

In Norman Hall, McGuire was known as a well-loved professor of English education — a position he held for 38 years — and founder of a novel internship program that used student teaching interns as full-time substitutes in Key West schools.

Outside the UF campus, McGuire was known as a scourge of shoddy schools and an unvarnished critic of politicians who defended them.

In the mid-1960s, after McGuire had been teaching at UF for almost two decades, he was appointed to the Evaluation Team of the Southern Association of Colleges and Schools. He didn’t like what he saw.

“Up until that time it was a rubber stamp,” McGuire said in a 1995 interview with UF’s Oral History Project. “Anybody got accredited by the Southern Association.”

When McGuire became chair of the group in 1965, SACS began yanking the accreditation of schools McGuire found to be substandard – including every single school in Jacksonville, where McGuire observed overcrowded classrooms, outdated texts, exposed electrical wiring in school buildings and other violations.

McGuire’s hard line on accreditation led to hearings by the Florida Legislature, during which some lawmakers threatened to ban SACS from operating in the Sunshine State. One legislator ribbed the professor by saying that, by McGuire’s standards, then-Secretary of Defense Robert MacNamara would not have been qualified to be principal of a secondary school.

“No,” McGuire quipped. “And he could not be a Florida legislator either.”

McGuire remained outspoken on accountability issues throughout his career, and he applied his expertise to school systems in other countries, serving as a Fulbright scholar in Mexico and an educational advisor to Bermuda and Argentina.

He was born in Harrison, New York and began his teaching career in New York schools. After earning his master’s degree from Columbia in 1942, McGuire spent four years in Navy intelligence, where, among other jobs, he was in charge of distributing multi-engine planes for combat squadrons throughout the Pacific theater. He worked on Wall Street briefly before coming to Florida to teach, coach and pursue a doctorate at UF.