James S. Spencer, an educator who oversaw the creation of a multi-campus community college district serving a 13-county region of southeastern Illinois, died May 30, 2012, in Burien, Wash.

In the mid-1970s Spencer developed the nation's first rural "college without walls", Frontier Community College, one of the four colleges comprising Illinois Eastern Community Colleges (IECC) district 529. Notably, for 15 years the four colleges charged no tuition to Illinois residents.

Born in 1926 in the family's one-bedroom farmhouse near Maynard, Ark., Spencer grew up during the Great Depression. "We never had shoes to wear except for the cold months," he recalled. "From early spring to late fall we went barefooted." As a boy Spencer was up at 4:30 in the morning to milk cows, feed chickens, slop pigs and harness the mules--and then walk two miles to his one-room school.

Neither his mother Daisy nor his father Hulen had more than four years of classroom education, yet they made sure their son stayed in school. After graduating from high school in 1943, 17-year old Spencer enlisted in the US Navy and served four years as a medic with the 5th Marines division in the south Pacific and China.

The GI Bill enabled him to enroll at the University of Missouri. As a senior in college, Spencer married Memphis native Jacqueline Turner. They had a daughter, Valerie, in 1951, and later were divorced. Armed with a new bachelor's degree, the young graduate landed a $2700-peryear teaching and coaching job in Troy, Mo. Later, while coaching in the Missouri towns of Bloomfield and Sullivan, Spencer took classes at the university and, in 1955, earned a master's degree in educational administration. He was hired the following year as principal of the junior senior high school in Knoxville, Ill., and two years later was appointed superintendent of the largely rural school district.

In Knoxville Spencer met Claire Sherwood Kimble, a widow with two boys, and on Christmas Eve of 1958 they were married. Daughter Sarah was born in 1961.

In 1963 Spencer pulled up stakes and moved his family to Champaign, Ill., where he spent three years earning a doctorate in education at the University of Illinois. He credited a former University of Missouri professor, John Rufi, with inspiring him to strive for this advanced degree. "He must be singled out as the one who made me believe in myself and that I could become what I wanted to become," Spencer wrote.

His dissertation on establishing a statewide system of regional junior colleges proved to be a seminal work that led to two years' employment as associate secretary of the Illinois Community College Board. In 1968 he was hired as president of Olney Central College. He was made chancellor of the newly inaugurated community college district the following year, serving with distinction until his retirement in 1983, when he was named chancellor emeritus.

A devout proponent of educational opportunity, Spencer made waves in the predominantly white small-town area in 1968 by arranging for several disadvantaged Chicago-area African-American students to move to the community and study at Olney Central College. One of the students, Vranda Barclay, lived with Spencer and his wife Claire in their Olney home.

In retirement Spencer served as a consultant for a number of institutions in Illinois, including Knox College, East-West University and Bellevue Community College. He was an adjunct professor at the University of Illinois for one year, and he served for eight months as interim president of Three Rivers Community College in Poplar Bluff, Mo., where his parents had moved after they left the farm in 1942.

Of all the challenges he faced during his lifetime, none was more demanding--or rewarding, he later said--than caring for his wife Claire, afflicted with Alzheimer's disease, throughout her lengthy demise. As her symptoms worsened, he devoted more and more of his time to her care. By the mid-1990s it was no longer possible to care for her at home and she was placed in a nursing home. Most days would find Spencer at her bedside. She died on October 16, 2000, in Seattle.

Throughout his career as an educational administrator, Spencer lobbied vigorously for equalization of statewide funding for education. Upon Spencer's retirement from IECC, Olney Central College president Charles Novak wrote:

Of all the things I have noticed about Jim Spencer, it is that he has given his
energy, effort and enthusiasm to the College district--even at the price of other
things. When work needed to be done, Jim Spencer did it. Through the entire
process he demonstrated kindness and sensitivity, but he was also able to be very
tough and very hard when difficult decisions were required. Jim Spencer also
demonstrated solid political sensitivity. Colleges in Illinois which enjoy
equalization funding enjoy it because of Jim Spencer's political ability, the manner
in which he built alliances, and the logic he used to persuade the legislators to
vote for us, not against us. Jim Spencer had a vision which he has made reality,
the Illinois Eastern Community College District.