Frederick Palmer Whiddon

Who was Frederick Palmer Whiddon?

Frederick Palmer Whiddon was the founder and long-time president of the University of South Alabama, the first four-year state-supported university in Mobile, Alabama.

Whiddon was born in Newville, Alabama. He was a graduate of Birmingham-Southern College and Emory University. He held the position of dean of students at Athens State College in Athens, Alabama, when he took the job as director of the University of Alabama's extension service in Mobile. Whiddon then spearheaded the drive to create an autonmous new university in Mobile. That university was officially begun in 1963 and taught its first classes in 1964.

Whiddon's 35-year tenure as the president of the University of South Alabama was marked by dramatic growth. The university came to comprise nine colleges and schools. One of those, the College of Medicine, opened in 1972 as the state's second medical school and re-established Mobile as a center of physician training in Alabama, a position it held as a monopoly until the early 20th century, when Alabama's original medical school closed.

Whiddon also founded the University of South Alabama Foundation to support the university's mission. The foundation amassed a huge endowment by the 1990s, primarily by depositing federal and state reimbursements to the university for medical services performed at its hospitals. After this technique became the subject of a lawsuit, the university and the USA Foundation agreed to spend the medical reimbursements only for medical-related purposes and to refrain from further diversion of medical reimbursements into the foundation.