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Ulric St. Clair Haynes
Courtesy Harvard Business School Archives
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Contact
Nickname
- Rick
Family
Amherst Relatives
- Yolande Haynes W'52
Personal
About Me
- My professional career has included service in the NY State Department of Commerce, the United Nations European Office, The Ford Foundation Overseas Development Program, US Foreign Service, National Security Council staff, Executive Recruitment and Management Consulting, Vice President of the Cummins Engine Company, American Ambassador to Algeria, President of AFS Intercultural Program, Acting President of the SUNY College at Old Westbury, Dean of Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University, Executive Dean for International Relations at Hofstra University, Adjunct Professor at Rollins College, Adjunct Professor and Distinguished Visiting Scholar at the University of Central Florida, and higher education consultant. At the May 2012 Amherst commencement, I received an honorary doctor of laws degree.
Interests
- My interests include, but are not limited to, US foreign policy, international relations, Middle Eastern and Iranian affairs, Caribbean and Latin American affairs, US civil rights, higher education, French language and culture, etc.
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Amherst
Reunion Class
- 1952
Graduation Year
- 1952
Major(s)
- Political Science
Other Academic
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The sole child of immigrants from the Barbados, Ulric St. Clair Haynes Jr. was born June 8, 1931 in Brooklyn, New York. Haynes attended Amherst College in Massachusetts, graduating cum laude in 1952, and then earned a law degree at Yale University four years later. Haynes worked briefly as an executive assistant with the New York State Department of Commerce, and from 1956 to 1959 he was an administrative officer with the United Nations’ European Office in Geneva, Switzerland, assigned to recruit military and police officers for the UN’s Palestine peacekeeping missions and attend to UN concerns in the newly independent Republic of Guinea.
A hallmark of Haynes’ professional life was his alternating private sector and public service employment. From 1960 to 1963 he was the Ford Foundation’s Assistant Regional Director for West Africa. In 1964 he was the U.S. State Department’s desk officer for Southwest Africa, and from 1964 to 1966 he monitored politics in Africa for the National Security Council under McGeorge Bundy. While working as a management consultant from 1966 to 1972, Haynes also taught as an adjunct business professor at Harvard University. Hired in 1972 as Vice President of Management Development for Cummins Engine Company, located in Columbus, Indiana, two years later he became the company’s Vice President for the Middle East and African Affairs and was relocated in Tehran, Iran from 1975 to 1977.
Made aware of his varied experiences in Africa and the Middle East, in 1977 President Jimmy Carter nominated Haynes as U.S. Ambassador to Algeria. Starting November 4, 1979, Americans were riveted by reports out of Iran concerning 66 persons taken hostage at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran. Because of his experience in the Iranian capital and familiarity with the Middle East and North Africa, Haynes helped negotiate the release of the hostages. On January 20, 1981 Haynes stood beside Deputy Secretary of State Warren Christopher to greet the liberated hostages upon their arrival in Algiers, Algeria. Fluent in five languages, Haynes was credited with having significantly improved American-Algerian relations prior to the crisis and Algeria in turn proved the crucial intermediary in negotiations to free the hostages.
Haynes’ tenure as ambassador ended in 1981. He returned to Cummins Engine Company as Vice President for International Business and was welcomed back by the city of Columbus, Indiana. To show its appreciation for Haynes’ efforts in resolving the 444-day hostage drama, Columbus designated February 6, 1981 as “Ulric Haynes Day.” After quitting Cummins Engine Company, Haynes became a senior vice president at the human resources consulting firm of Drake Beam Morin, Inc. in New York City. From 1985 to 1986 Haynes was Acting President of the Old Westbury campus of State University of New York, and in 1991 he was appointed Dean of the Frank G. Zarb School of Business at Hofstra University in Hempstead, New York, retiring there in 2003.
In retirement Haynes, a collector of fine African art, continued lecturing on foreign affairs, maintained his ties to professional associations, businesses, nonprofits, and artistic and cultural groups. He is the recipient of numerous recognitions including seven honorary doctorates. Haynes married Haitian-born Yolanda Toussaint in 1969, and they have two children, Gregory and Alexandra.
About the Author
Robert Fikes, Jr., a 1970 graduate of Tuskegee University, earned graduate degrees in modern European history and library science at the University of Minnesota. Retired since 2017, he worked as a reference librarian at San Diego State University where he was also a subject bibliographer for Africana Studies, European, American, Middle Eastern, and African history. Fikes has published numerous journal articles, essays, encyclopedia entries, newspaper and magazine contributions, bibliographies, and several print and online books pertaining to history, art, and literature.
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In Memory
Rick Haynes told a civil rights panel at our 40th reunion that he had a Yale law degree and a distinguished career, including a U.S. ambassadorship, “but I can’t get a taxi in New York.” I remember it well. Some said he should have been more grateful for opportunities and achievements. I thought otherwise and still do.
Attention must be paid, even at this late date. Rick died Aug. 21 at 89.
Rick’s parents came from Barbados and settled first in Brooklyn’s not-yet-segregated Bed-Stuy neighborhood. His father clerked for Socony oil, run then by Amherst’s Pratt family. Fred Pratt ’30, learning that Rick was finishing high school, determined that he must attend Amherst, where he won a full scholarship.
Shunned by fraternities, he shunned them back and joined Lord Jeff. His roommate was the other member of the racial quota of two, Ken Brown ’52. When a white classmate wanted to room with them, the dean required written permission from his parents. “Ironically,” Rick later noted, “no one in the Amherst administration felt it was necessary to contact my parents for permission to room with a white student.” Ken soon was yanked to service by his uncharitable home draft board but was able to return and complete his pre-med studies.
Rick sang in the glee club, played Hamlet’s ghostly father as a Masquer, fenced, was class choregus. After Yale Law School, he was politely rejected by dozens of leading law firms but managed to get an executive post with New York Governor Averill Harriman, who later boosted his major diplomatic mission, ambassador to Algeria from 1977-81. There, his experience and French fluency were instrumental to the team that negotiated the release of American hostages in Iran.
Racial slights and insults punctuated his professional successes, which included service on LBJ’s National Security Council staff; the Ford Foundation; posts in Nigeria, Tunisia, Iran and in U.S. corporate positions. He taught law and commerce, was dean of Hofstra University’s business school, settled in Florida and taught at three colleges there.
So, Rick had many victories against racial headwinds, all too plentiful for this space. Amherst awarded him an honorary degree in 2012, one of only four 1952’s so honored. His wife, Yolande; his daughter, Alexandra, and son Gregory survive him. He was bitter, charming and able.
Rest well, Rick.
Jack MacKenzie ’52
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ULRIC S. HAYNES, JR. (1931-2020)
Ulric “Rick” S. Haynes, Jr., a former Trustee of Deep Springs and Withrow lecturer, died of COVID-19 in August at the age of 89. He had retired to Florida after a long career as a diplomat, public servant, businessman, educator, and advisor and friend to people of all ages. He served on the National Security Council staff during the Johnson administration; taught in a Freedom School in Mississippi during the Civil Rights movement; represented the Cummins Engine Company in Tehran under the Shah; and was the United States Ambassador to Algeria from 1977 to 1981. In the last capacity he was on the team that negotiated the freedom of American hostages in Tehran. (Algeria mediated the negotiations.)
Rick spent the back half of his career in education, as president of SUNY-Old Westbury and later dean at Hofstra. His transition to academia was a stroke of luck for many young people with whom he interacted without pretense or condescension. If you wanted to know about the world but knew nothing of it, meeting Rick could yield reading suggestions, introductions, jokes, anecdotes, frank assessments of politicians foreign and domestic, and the friendship of a man whose generosity was overwhelming and instinctive. A conversation with Rick could end with his arranging your meeting with the leader of the resistance to French rule in the Casbah of Algiers, or telling you how the Black Panther fundraiser in Tom Wolfe’s essay “Radical Chic” (1970) really went down. (Rick was there, and Wolfe quoted him pungently.)
Rick came to Deep Springs in April 1998 as a guest speaker, at the introduction of his friends William vanden Heuvel DS4TK, Robert F. Gatje, DS4TK, and Ed Wisely, DS4TK. He lectured in Algeria and foreign relations to a student body (SB) that was — like many SBs before it — not previously engaged in discussion of international affairs, at least not of the modern era. (The Peloponnesian War, maybe, bot not the policies of the Carter administration.) He connected students with opportunities abroad and introduced them to acquaintances who could nurture their interests. The Trustees invited him, with student encouragement, to join the board, and he accepted. He served until 2004, devoting himself to the internationalization and diversification of the SB.
His contributions to Deep Springs came 50 years late. That was not his fault. Rick had wanted to apply as a student in 1948, but he was black, and Deep Springs did not admit black students. His contributions are noted with affection, and with sadness and embarrassment that they could not have come earlier. —Graeme Wood, DS97
Rick Haynes pronounced my name — ‘Christian Von Nicholson?’ — with a voice for radio and a diplomat’s formality. When I first heard him over the receiver in a phone booth at the San Francisco Zen Center, I thought I was in trouble. It was actually the opposite of trouble. Rick was a Dickensian benefactor ex machina, and he had taken an interest in me.
I had dropped out of Deep Springs after my first year and spent the next two years clinically depressed. When the call came through in September 1998, I was wearing dark sweats and flip flops, a kind of pre-monk studying meditation and considering a career as a bodhisattva. Rick was a Deep Springs trustee, and he had a way of rescuing strays.
For several years he played a crucial part in my life, leading me from the Zen Center through Guatemala to the American University of Paris, where he had ties as a Hofstra dean. He did the same, using different paths, for many others.
There were few places where Rick did not know someone.
His network extended to Bangladesh, where I had gone to study microfinance at Grameen Bank and was traveling from village to village to see its system of social pressure and support in action. Rick wanted to open my eyes to the possibilities of the place, and suggested I meet an old friend. This friend led a group that sang ragas late into the night, sitting on the floor of a small room with white-washed walls. They invited singers from the Indian state of West Bengal to come back and teach Bangladeshis their techniques, since many musicians in east Bengal had been killed in the war of independence.
Rick had a high tolerance for that mixture of ambition, curiosity and naïveté that marks a certain type of Deep Springer in their 20s. He listened well, and made you feel like you were in on whatever joke he was weaving.
His stories made subtle points — about how the world works, or could be made to work, when things fall apart and the skills of diplomats are tested. They were parables of particular interest to Deep Springers, who train in acrimony during SB meetings, and to whom Rick could offer lessons in resolution.
When Rick was ambassador in Algiers, he and his wife turned the canteen of the US Embassy into the place to gather, even as his deft, welcoming manner made him a magnet for human intelligence. During that time, the US had no official ties to the PLO. But Rick maintained contact by attending diplomatic soirees. He and an accomplice would face one another in conversation, while drifting toward a pair of Palestinian officials doing the same dance, until finally he and his counterpart could speak directly back to back, while seeming to speak with someone else entirely. His goal was to break an impasse with a group that mattered to US interests, and he did so with suave flexibility toward the rules.
With his death, the country has lost a public servant, Deep Springs a friend, and younger generations a mentor. He will be sorely missed. —Chris Nicholson DS95
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Ulric St. Clair Haynes Jr. (June 8, 1931 – August 21, 2020) was an American diplomat,lawyer, and university professor. He served as the U.S. Ambassador to Algeria from 1977 to 1981,[1] and a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy, Council of American Ambassadors and Council on Foreign Relations.
Biography
Haynes, the son of West Indian immigrants to the United States, was one of the first two black campers to be invited to attend Camp Rising Sun, an international, full-scholarship summer camp in 1947.[2]
Haynes graduated from Amherst College in 1952, from Yale Law School in 1956, and attended the Harvard Business Schools six-week Advanced Management Program.[3]
Public service and business career
Haynes served with the New York State Department of Commerce, the United States Department of State from 1956 to 1959.[4]
He was on the staff of the National Security Council and served as an administrative officer with the United Nations European Office in Geneva in 1965 and 1966.[4][5]
From 1960 to 1962, Haynes was assistant to the representative for West Africa of the Ford Foundation in Lagos, Nigeria. Following that, he was assistant to the Foundation's representative for North Africa in Tunis, Tunisia, from 1962 to 1963. From there, he went to work at the State Department, where he was assistant officer in charge of Moroccan affairs from 1963 to 1964. In 1964 and 1965, Haynes became the officer in charge of High Commission Territories and South West Africa. From 1965 to 1966, he served on the staff of the National Security Council at the White House, specializing in African affairs.[4]
From 1966 to 1970, Haynes was the president of Management Formation, Inc. From 1972 to 1974, he was a vice president at Cummins Engine Company. He was appointed to be the American ambassador to Algeria by President Jimmy Carter on April 27, 1977,[4] and served from 1977 to 1981. He was one of the negotiators during the Iran hostage crisis at American embassy in Iran.[2][5]
Haynes was a partner at Spencer Stuart and Associates and He has also served on the boards of directors of the ABC Broadcasting Companies, Rohm & Haas, HSBC Bank USA, ING Reliastar Insurance Company of NY, INNCOM, and Pall Corporation.[5]
Academia
Haynes was a visiting lecturer at the Harvard Business School from 1968 to 1972.[4] He has also lectured at Stanford Business School. He was the president of the State University of New York College at Old Westbury.[5] He was dean of the Frank G. Zarb School of Business and the executive dean of university international relations at Hofstra University from 1996 till his retirement in 2003.[6] He is an adjunct professor of international relations at Rollins College and the University of Central Florida. Haynes says that "contact with students" is what he likes most about teaching.[5]
He holds honorary doctorates from Indiana University, Butler University, John Jay College, Fisk University, Alabama State University, Mercy College, and Amherst College.[5]
Haynes is also a member of the American Academy of Diplomacy.[7]
Personal life and death
Haynes was married to the former Yolande Toussaint and had two children.[2]
He died from COVID-19 on August 21, 2020, at the age of 89.[8][9]
References
- "The Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training Foreign Affairs Oral History Project AMBASSADOR ULRIC HAYNES JR" (PDF). Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training. 20 April 2011. Archived (PDF) from the original on 18 July 2024. Retrieved 18 July 2024.
- Ulric Haynes Jr., "A Mixed Bag of Memories of CRS from Some Sixty Years Ago" Archived 2011-07-16 at the Wayback Machine (PDF) Sundial (December 2007). Retrieved June 29, 2010
- Ulric Haynes profile Retrieved June 29, 2010
- President Jimmy Carter, "United States Ambassador to Algeria - Nomination of Ulric S. Haynes, Jr" The American Presidency Project, official website. (April 27, 1977) Retrieved June 29, 2010
- Jean Bernard Chery, "Holt Spotlight Interview: Professor of Political Science, Ambassador Ulric Haynes, Jr." Archived 2011-07-25 at the Wayback Machine The Sandspur, "The Oldest College Newspaper in Florida - Founded 1894". (October 7, 2005) Retrieved June 29, 2010
- Ulric S. Haynes profile[dead link] Forbes Retrieved June 29, 2010
- "Ulric Haynes". The American Academy of Diplomacy. Retrieved 2020-05-27.
- "ULRIC S. HAYNES, JR. (1931-2020)". April 13, 2021.
- "Ulric St. C. Haynes Jr. '52 | 1952 | Amherst College".
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