Grant Fairbanks
The present reputation of the Department of Speech and Hearing Science as an institution of varied and extensive research activities was initially established through the creative efforts of Dr. Grant Fairbanks. Following experience on the faculties of the Universities of Iowa and Southern California, and wartime service as Chief of Aural Rehabilitation at Borden General Hospital, Fairbanks was named professor of speech and director of a new Speech Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois in 1948. He immediately set about to inaugurate full-scale research in speech and hearing science. First, he facilitated the hiring of two tenure-track faculty members, one in speech and one in hearing, and then oversaw the renovation of the entire third floor of Illini Hall to provide adequate facilities for the numerous activities he envisioned.
The laboratory he established soon became recognized as one of the leading centers for technical research in these areas. He recruited a group of capable and enthusiastic young graduate students who carried out a wide range of studies and earned the first doctoral degrees in speech and hearing science at the U of I. According to Dr. Gordon Peterson, founder of the Speech Research Institute at the University of Michigan and a contemporary of Dr. Fairbanks, these students “received unique training in the field under his mature and enlightened guidance. These men and women went on to have a strong influence in the field of speech and hearing research, and the loyalty which they showed their major professor over the years is ample testimony of the quality of leadership that he provided during their years of academic training.”
Fairbanks was recognized to be a person of intense purposes and strong opinions. As Peterson reflected, “Dr. Fairbanks was intolerant of ignorance and scornful of careless thinking. But beneath his academic austerity was a friendliness and warmth which was genuine and overwhelming. His students knew this, and he gave them his time and energies in a most generous way. That he could give so much of himself to his students and still produce the volume of work his bibliography attests is remarkable.”
Dr. Fairbanks also was named editor of the Journal of Speech and Hearing Disorders, at that time the sole research publication of the American Speech and Hearing Association, shortly after coming to Illinois, thus considerably increasing the national visibility of the department. He held this position from 1954 to 1959. Previously, he had served as consulting or associate editor of the Quarterly Journal of Speech and several other scholarly journals in his field. In recognition of his service and the quality of his research, the American Speech and Hearing Association awarded him the Honors of the Association in 1955.
In 1962 Grant Fairbanks left the University of Illinois to accept the position of director of research at the Sub- Committee on Noise Research Center in Los Angeles. However, his friends at the Stanford Research Institute soon persuaded him to become head of the Speech Research Group at that institute in Menlo Park. As he stood at the horizon of this new research program of great scientific promise, Dr. Fairbanks tragically died aboard an airliner in June 1964 while returning to San Francisco from Chicago. The plane made an unscheduled landing at Denver, and the coroner determined that he had died by asphyxiation due to ingesting a piece of food that had lodged in his throat. This unfortunate accident robbed the profession of one of its most competent and enlightened scientists at an age when many important research contributions and much research leadership were yet to be realized.
Dr. Murray Miron, a student of Dr. Fairbanks in the 1950s, wrote in the preface to Experimental Phonetics: Selected Articles by Grant Fairbanks about the dedication and passion Dr. Fairbanks brought to his work. “Dr. Fairbanks would often proclaim that science is a way of life; and I know of no other person to whom such a philosophy was more fitting or appropriate.”
