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Professor Willis Truitt 1936-2006
by Mark Scheinbaum

The family of Prof. Willis Truitt, faculty union pioneer and longtime chairman of the Department of Philosophy at the University of South Florida, died on March 8 at age 69, after a long illness.

His colleague, Professor Roy Weatherford, said that a memorial service is being planned for some date in the future, and his wife Dr. Galina Truitt said there would also be a memorial observance at their part-time home at San Marino near Portobelo in the Republic of Panama.

Dr. Truitt joined the USF faculty in 1968 and held a bachelor's degree from George Washington University, Master of Art from Boston University where he also was granted his Ph.D. He was an internationally published authority in aesthetics, ethics, and social philosophy. His visiting professorships included work at Moscow State University in the former Soviet Union.

In Florida, Truitt was known as a community activist who was one of the original organizers and officers of the United Faculty of Florida, working with the American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO to bring collective bargaining to teachers at nine Florida state-run university campuses. After winning collective bargaining rights and a first contract for professors in the 1970s, he again led the efforts to successfully organize non-instructional employees who worked on the campuses.

Through the UFF, Dr. Truitt was a regular figure at conferences and symposia on labor-management relations in Tallahassee, Gainesville, and throughout the university system.