The 13th president of the university (1919–34), John Harcourt Alexander Morgan was born in Strathroy, Ontario, Canada, and was a Canadian citizen when he assumed the presidency of the university, a violation of a 1919 Tennessee law prohibiting schools from hiring teachers who were not US citizens. He held the bachelor’s degree from Ontario Agricultural College (1889) and studied briefly at Cornell in 1892 and 1898. He came to the university in 1904 from Louisiana State University, where he was a professor of entomology and zoology in the Agricultural College and director of the Gulf Biological Station (1900–1905).
He was made Tennessee’s state entomologist in 1905. He was president of the Association of Economic Entomology in 1907. In 1913 he was offered, and declined, the presidencies of the University of Virginia and the University of Maryland. He served UT as director of the Experiment Station, state entomologist, and dean of the college, and was sworn into office as president of UT on July 10, 1919. He coined the phrase and advocated strongly for the concept that “the State Is the Campus of The University of Tennessee” and encouraged the state to utilize the research capabilities of faculty at the university for the benefit of state government. Morgan became well known for his philosophy “The Common Mooring,” by which he meant mankind’s relationship to the environment and the responsibility to improve and conserve it. In 1927 he served as president of the Association of Land-Grant Colleges and Universities.
In 1933 he was appointed to the board of directors of TVA (over strong objections communicated to Washington by former faculty member John R. Neal, who had been fired by Morgan 10 years earlier). He resigned the presidency of the university in August 1934. He continued as a TVA director, serving as chairman of the board from 1938 to 1941 and retiring from the board in 1948. The Progressive Farmer named him Man of the Year in 1940.
For approximately 25 years, he and Thomas McCrosky Sr. operated a 700-acre farm near what is now McGhee Tyson Airport. The farm, MacMor, was noted for its beef cattle. For many years he was a member of Church Street Methodist Church and taught a Sunday school class there. In the church’s first bay on the south in the sanctuary is the “Morgan Memorial” of stained-glass windows, with the figures of St. Luke and St. John and of the sower and the reaper. The dedicatory inscription reads: “The windows of this Bay Commemorate the Common Mooring / Concept of Doctor Harcourt A. Morgan / Churchman, Teacher, Spiritual Engineer.”