Born in Mulberry, Tennessee, Felix Massey graduated from the Webb School of Bell Buckle in 1899 and then from Vanderbilt, where he was a well-known football player and debater and a member of Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity. He served as the first paid secretary of the YMCA at Vanderbilt in 1902–03. He left Vanderbilt and established the Massey Military School at Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1903.
He left the headship of his school in 1924 to become UT’s first dean of men, a position that was expanded to dean of students in 1937. He was a respected and beloved campus official. He died in September 1938 in Indio, California, while on the first vacation he had taken since coming to the university. A sunstroke weakened his resistance to the chronic illness of leukemia. He was survived by his wife, Maria Massey, a UT faculty member, and two sons.
During his tenure, he was a staunch advocate of academic quality. He was instrumental in having a C average established as the minimum acceptable standard for continuance into the junior year of study, and he initiated the policy that the number of “cuts” allowable in a course would be equivalent to the number of times the course met each week. He advocated keeping housing and tuition costs as low as possible and initiated cooperative dormitories to assist students financially.