The UT iSchool community is mourning the loss of Ronald Wyllys, professor emeritus and former dean of the school. Wyllys led what was then called the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) from 1982 to 1990. In that period, he guided the school through an important period of change and growth, as the field of library and information science began to expand into a broader discipline now known as information studies. Wyllys’s academic specialization, which included early work on natural-language processing, put him at the vanguard of this transition.
An Early Career in and out of Academia
Born in Phoenix, Arizona in 1930, Wyllys earned a bachelor’s degree from Arizona State College in 1950, where he distinguished himself as a savant in mathematics and a committed pluralist as head of the school’s religious council. After college, Wyllys became a graduate student in mathematics at the University of California, Berkeley, then served as an electronics technician and officer in the U.S. Navy (retiring as a captain), where he wrote his first computer program in 1952. From there, Wyllys went to work for seven years at the National Security Agency in Washington, D.C., where he also taught mathematics at George Washington University. Next, he took on roles as an associate in information retrieval for the Planning Research Corporation in Los Angeles and as a computer systems specialist for the System Development Corporation in Santa Monica, California, an early think tank.
Returning to academia, Wyllys earned his Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Wisconsin–Madison in 1974. While at UW, he also served as Chief Systems Analyst in the University Libraries, a role created for him.
A Crucial Legacy at UT
Over 31 years on the UT Austin faculty, Wyllys' research centered on advanced information technologies, natural-language processing for information storage and retrieval, quantitative linguistics, and education for library and information science. He was a co-author of National Document Handling Systems for Science and Technology.
But his biggest contributions would come through his tenure as dean of the GSLIS, as he pushed the school to embrace the technologies and statistics-driven approaches that would come to define the field. His efforts positioned UT as a leader in the emerging iSchool movement.
"I believe Ron was a foundational thinker in the field whose ideas and values influenced the emergence of the information field as a research-intensive home for a human approach to information products and services,” says Andrew Dillon, V.M. Daniel Regents Professor at the iSchool and also a former dean. “He would have been very much at home in the current school."
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Wyllys also served in various planning and advisory capacities for the Central Texas Library System and Austin Public Library. Wyllys retired from UT in the spring of 2003. At the invitation of then-Dean Dillon, he returned that year to deliver the iSchool’s graduation convocation address. Ever forward-looking, Wyllys’s address was titled "The Times They Are A-Changin'."
Among his friends, colleagues, and those he mentored, Wyllys is also remembered fondly as an energetic presence on campus, as well as a husband, father, grandfather, amateur astronomer, and basso profundo in the Austin Lyric Opera and other local choruses.
"Ron was an incredibly smart scholar and a delightful conversationalist,” Dillon says. “He was as passionate about the mathematics of information as he was the power of music."