On November 15, 1903, the New York Times reported that in a secret meeting the preceding day, the board of trustees of the University of Cincinnati had declared the position of President Howard Ayers to be vacant, but that he would remain until a successor was found. From 1871 until 1899, the University of Cincinnati had been mostly governed by the board and had only briefly (1885–89) had a president, after which the executive function was fulfilled by rotation of deans. In 1898 a committee had been formed to search for a president. The committee recommended Howard Ayers, head of the Zoology Department at the University of Missouri, Columbia. William Howard Taft, then dean of the University of Cincinnati Law School (1896–1900), was on the presidential search committee and continued to support Ayers as he called for the resignations of almost all faculty and battled with faculty and institutional constituencies over his vision for shaping the institution.
In December 1903 UT President Charles Dabney announced that he was resigning to assume the presidency of the University of Cincinnati. When the search for a new president of the University of Tennessee was underway, Taft—who had left the University of Cincinnati to become a justice of the federal Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals (1892–1900) and was in 1903 Governor of the Philippines—and his friend and fellow Sixth Circuit Court Appeals Justice (1893–1909) Horace Lurton, put forth Howard Ayers as a candidate for the UT position. Trustee Edward Terry Sanford acknowledged the nomination on April 2, 1904, as that of “Ayres [sic] of Cincinnati.” Ayers of Cincinnati, having been recommended by Taft and Lurton, was undoubtedly considered for the post, but on June 29, the trustees chose Dr. C. Alphonso Smith of the University of North Carolina. Smith visited the campus in July and declined the post on July 13.
The board of trustees’ committee for selection of the president, after reading Smith’s letter of refusal, recommended that a member of the faculty be elected to a one-year term as acting president. At the board of trustees’ meeting of July 20, 1904, however, that recommendation was supplanted by the nomination of Brown Ayres by a board of trustee’s member (probably Edward Terry Sanford, who had a letter from former President Dabney proposing and endorsing Brown Ayres, dean of the faculty at Tulane, from whom Dabney had received a letter saying that he [Ayres] would consider the presidency “most favorably.”) The trustees voted to accept Brown Ayres of Tulane on July 20, but due to the small number of trustees present, postponed the election until August 2, when Ayres was present to be chosen by unanimous vote. The misspelling of Ayers in the acknowledgment letter by Sanford probably was the genesis of the myth—but the sequence of events makes it clear that Brown Ayres was the board’s choice after Alphonso Smith declined.