Archives West Finding Aid

Born September 28, 1881, in Salt Lake City, Feramorz Young Fox was a son of Jesse W. and Ruth May Fox. His mother, at 104, was still alive at the time of her son's death. Fox married Anna Wilcken in 1906; they later became parents of three children. Graduated from the University of Utah the year of his marriage, Fox devoted his career to a series of teaching and administrative positions at the L.D.S. University in Salt Lake City, becoming its president in 1926. At the University of Utah he had been a gifted and versatile student with interests in chemistry, geology, and English literature. In 1920 he was awarded a Willard D. Thompson scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he completed a master's degree in economics in 1912 with a thesis on "Cooperation in the Raisin Industry of California." He was offered a temporary instructorship at Berkeley and was urged to complete his doctorate with additional research on the economics of cooperation, but illness in his family compelled his return to Salt Lake City. In the 1920s his research interests shifted to land economics, and he completed his doctorate at Northwestern University in 1932 with a dissertation on "The Mormon Land System."

Thus, Fox brought a unique set of qualifications to the study of experiments in cooperation among the Mormons, which he began in 1932 at the depths of the Great Depression. He was well versed in the economics and history of cooperatives in England and the United States and was also thoroughly familiar with the economic problems of Utah agriculture and the rural communities based upon it. His grandfather had surveyed the streets of Salt Lake City; President Fox, like his father before him, had grown up in the Salt Lake City milieu. Finally, President Fox combined the skills of a trained economist with a mature understanding of the behavior of people in organizations.

When he become its president in 1926, the school then known as the L.D.S. University consisted of a high school, junior college, and business college. The junior college was discontinued in the late 1920s and the high school in 1931; President Fox guided the L.D.S. Business College successfully through the depression, war, and postwar years until his retirement in 1948. He was an active member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, serving as a high counselor in the Emigration Stake and member of the Sunday School board of the Ensign Stake. He was past president of the Salt Lake Kiwanis Club, the Executive Club, and the Emeritus Club of the University of Utah. He died on November 29, 1957, at the age of seventy-six.