Union mourns death of longtime university champion Agee

JACKSON, Tenn. — During his freshman year at Union University, Bob Agee had a conversation that changed his life.

His freshman English professor, Helen Blythe, told Agee in class one day to stop by her desk on his way out.

“I thought, ‘Oh me, what have I done wrong?’” Agee recalled.

But Blythe’s intention was to encourage, not to reprimand.

“Mr. Agee, I’ve been reading your essays, and you have the potential to write,” she told him. She wanted him to start writing for the Cardinal & Cream, Union’s campus newspaper.

“I was flabbergasted,” he said. “I have the potential to write?”

Agee, a 1960 Union graduate and former professor and administrator who led Oklahoma Baptist University as president for 16 years, died Sept. 26 at age 87. He spent his life championing the university that launched his career in higher education.

“I don’t know that anyone had a greater love for Union than Bob Agee,” Union President Samuel W. “Dub” Oliver said. “It was a place that clearly meant the world to him, to his late wife Nelle and to their entire family. He invested his life in and for this institution.”

Nelle Agee died in 2020. The Agees’ two daughters, Robyn Hari and Denise Allen, are both Union graduates, and two of the Agees’ grandchildren are also Union graduates. Hari serves as chairman of the Union Board of Trustees. The family received the Union Family Legacy Award in 2019.

Agee grew up in Memphis and attended Union as he prepared for ministry. He excelled as a student and athlete at Union, earning eight athletic letters in cross country, track and tennis, and serving as editor of the Cardinal & Cream and president of the Rutledge History Club. He won the Strickland Oratorical Medal at Union and served as pastor of rural churches in Gibson County.

After completing his Bachelor of Arts degree at Union, he earned his Master of Divinity and Doctor of Ministry degrees from Southern Baptist Theological Seminary before graduating from George Peabody College for Teachers, now part of Vanderbilt University, with his Doctor of Philosophy degree.

Agee returned to his alma mater in the 1970s to work in a variety of roles, including vice president for religious affairs and special assistant to the president for institutional planning.

In 1982, Agee became president of OBU, which he led to an enrollment increase and the construction of 11 new facilities. Retiring from the university in 1998, Agee was named executive director of what is now the International Association of Baptist Colleges and Universities and later served as vice president for institutional advancement at Union. He was inducted into the Union Sports Hall of Fame in 2010.

“During the 1970s, for large segments of the institution’s constituency, Agee became the face of Union University, an institution that he dearly and deeply loved until the day that he died,” former Union President David S. Dockery wrote in a tribute to Agee. “His influence on students on the Union campus was legendary, especially on young preachers like Steve Gaines and young biblical scholars like George Guthrie, along with many others, who sensed a call to vocational ministry.”

Oliver said Agee invested in Union in countless ways after he returned to West Tennessee in 1998, from informally mentoring leaders across campus to teaching as an adjunct professor in the School of Adult and Professional Studies.

“He was always pouring his life out for others, finding ways to encourage, support and develop people,” Oliver said. “It’s very rare that I’ve been in a church in West Tennessee where someone didn’t ask me, ‘Do you know Bob Agee?’”

Oliver recently met a man at a church in Trenton, Tennessee, who came to faith in Christ when Agee was a Union student and serving as pastor of a church in Milan.

“Almost 70 years later, he told me he would never get over how grateful he was for Bob,” Oliver said. “That’s our expression as well. We’ll never get over how grateful we are for him.”

Visitation will be held Oct. 11 from 4-6 p.m. at Arrington Funeral Home in Jackson, with the funeral at 1 p.m. Oct. 12 at the Church at Sugar Creek in Humboldt, Tennessee. Visitation at the church from 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. will precede the funeral.