Learning Resources Institute

JOHN IVEY JR., PROMOTED EDUCATION BY ELECTRONICS New York Times News Service CHICAGO TRIBUNE John E. Ivey Jr., an innovator in using electronic communications for teaching, died Sunday at North Carolina Memorial Hospital in Chapel Hill, N.C., his hometown. He was 73. His family said the cause of death was pneumonia as a complication of Parkinson`s disease. In addition to being an early champion of using television and other modern technology in education, Mr. Ivey promoted cooperative programs among colleges and universities and with business and government. In 1948, he helped form the Southern Regional Education Board, a compact of 16 states that exchanged students within the region for specialized training that was unavailable in their home states. After spending two years in the late 1950s as executive vice president of New York University, he became the founding president of two educational organizations: the Learning Resources Institute, which promoted the use of films, radio, and television in education, and the Midwest Project on Airborne Television Instruction. A precursor of today`s satellite telecasts, the Midwest Project used transmitters on airplanes to beam courses to rural Midwest schools. Mr. Ivey later became a professor and dean of the College of Education at Michigan State University, where he retired in 1976. He was born in Raleigh, N.C., grew up in Auburn, Ala., and graduated from Auburn University. He earned a doctorate in sociology at the University of North Carolina, where he taught for several years and, at the age of 28, became the youngest full professor in the university`s history. In 1960, he served on a panel that made specific recommendations to President-elect John Kennedy on creating the Peace Corps. At various times in his career he also served as a racial-integration consultant to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission, as secretary of the American Council on Education, as a director of the Southern Association of Science and Industry, and as chairman of both the Florida Survey of Higher Education and the Survey of Reorganization of the Atlanta Schools System. He wrote many books and articles and won the Freedoms Foundation Medal and an Eisenhower Fellowship for foreign study.