Marvin Fruth, a beloved UW–Madison faculty member who mentored generations of students with warmth and dedication, passed away peacefully on April 13, 2025.
Fruth was a professor emeritus within the School of Education’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy Analysis, where he served for nearly three decades.
Fruth’s connection to UW–Madison began early in life. Growing up in south Madison in the 1930s and 1940s, the campus was his playground.
“My friends and I would go to the top floor of Science Hall and slide down the old fire escape chute until the janitor would chase us away,” Fruth said in the fall of 2018 for a story published in the School of Education’s Learning Connections alumni magazine. “We’d climb into the top of Bascom Hall between the ceiling and ventilation system, and we’d catch pigeons. In the fall we’d sneak into football games at Camp Randall Stadium.”
Shortly after graduating from Madison’s Central High School in 1949, Fruth enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps, where he served in Korea, earning a Purple Heart. He later used the GI Bill to pursue his education, first at UW–Whitewater and then at UW–Madison, where he met and married his wife, Beatrice, in 1954. He earned a bachelor’s degree in history and English from UW–Madison in 1956.
Fruth began his career in education as a teacher and guidance counselor in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. He later earned a master’s degree from the University of Missouri and returned to UW–Madison for his PhD in educational administration, which he completed in 1966.
While finishing his doctorate, Fruth took on a project assistantship working on the proposed new Educational Sciences building. When the project’s lead unexpectedly left, Fruth — despite having no formal experience — was put in charge. Fruth’s work on this project would lead to his appointment to the ELPA faculty by then-Dean Donald McCarty in 1966. He jokingly described himself as an “accidental professor.”
Fruth went on to have a distinguished career, teaching many courses in K-12 administration and leadership and serving as department chair. Fruth also worked on a range of education projects, including the Wisconsin Information Systems for Education (WISE), which developed automated scheduling and grade reporting for state high schools, and an initiative designed to better teach Black history in urban schools, which included Washington, D.C., New Orleans, Milwaukee, Racine, and Beloit among its participating districts.
But for Fruth, the greatest joy came from working with students and training future principals and superintendents from across the state.
“Marv was a beloved professor,” reflects Julie Underwood, a professor emerita and the former dean in the School of Education from 2005 to 2015. “He didn’t ‘advise’ doctoral students. He adopted them. He invited them into his home and his heart. He worked with them tirelessly through their studies and dissertations. He visited them in their offices across the state and he never forgot a single one of them.”
In 2012, Fruth’s son, Charles, established the Great People Scholarship to honor Marvin Fruth’s lasting impact on his students, colleagues, and the field of education. Marvin and Beatrice Fruth later committed a gift to bolster this scholarship, which is designed to assist undergraduate students in the School of Education who have financial need.
“I had a very satisfying career and was able to recruit and mentor a number of bright administrators and teachers,” Marvin Fruth said at the time. “Hopefully these scholarships will make a difference in the lives of future educators, too.”
Fruth’s family has asked that memorial gifts be made to the Great People Scholarship fund, through this link. This fund, they write, “is proudly supported by many of the students Marvin and Beatrice mentored throughout their lifetime.”
Read more about Marvin Fruth’s remarkable life in this obituary.