When Lattie F. Coor took over Arizona State University in 1990, the school did not yet hold the Carnegie Foundation's top classification for research universities. Twelve years later, when he retired, it did, and ASU had grown into a multi-campus system with a new honors college besides. Coor, who served as ASU's 15th president and, years earlier, as the 21st president of the University of Vermont, died on July 16, 2026, at 89.

Coor grew up in Avondale, Arizona, where both of his parents were elementary school teachers before his father became a principal and then a superintendent. His father, barred by law from hiring a Black woman as a teacher, hired Juanita Favors-Curtis anyway, bringing her on as a home economics and physical education instructor; she later earned a PhD at ASU and, years afterward, introduced herself to Coor, who had not known what his father had done. Coor wrote of coming of age "in an era where segregation was ruthlessly enforced in Arizona," and of watching a Japanese-American classmate's family taken to an internment camp during World War II. He graduated from Litchfield High School, where he played football, and went on to Arizona State College at Flagstaff, now Northern Arizona University, earning a bachelor's degree in political science in 1958.

He earned a master's degree and, in 1964, a PhD in political science from Washington University in St. Louis, where his dissertation studied the eroding job security of American governors. That same year he married Ina Fitzhenry; the couple had two sons and a daughter. Coor stayed on at Washington University for roughly a decade, rising from faculty member to vice chancellor.

In 1976, two days before his fortieth birthday, Coor was inaugurated as the 21st president of the University of Vermont, a post he held for nearly fourteen years. He established a Committee on Baccalaureate Education to overhaul the undergraduate curriculum, raised faculty pay, and secured the university's first endowed professorships. According to the University of Vermont, state appropriations to UVM climbed from $11.2 million to $29 million on his watch, and by 1990 the university's operating budget had reached $232 million with more than 3,000 employees. The gains were substantial enough that UVM was named one of the nation's "Public Ivys" in a widely read 1985 book ranking the country's best public universities, and in 2013 the university renamed its College of Arts and Sciences building at 438 College Street the Lattie F. Coor House. "Lattie Coor was one of the most influential presidents in UVM's history," said Robert F. Cioffi, then chair of the university's Board of Trustees, at the dedication. Coor said, "It affirms my very strong bond with UVM."

In 1990, Coor returned to the state where he had grown up to become ASU's 15th president. Four years in, ASU received Research 1 status from the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, the classification reserved for the nation's most active research universities. The Campaign for Leadership, launched under Coor in 1995, set out to raise $300 million and brought in more than $560 million instead, and the number of endowed faculty chairs at ASU grew from six to eighty over his tenure. He helped launch Barrett, The Honors College, and pushed ASU outward into a multi-campus system, defining the role of the West campus and helping establish what is now the Polytechnic campus. "ASU would not be the institution it is today without Lattie Coor's vision, leadership and commitment to the community," current ASU President Michael Crow said after his death.

Coor married Elva Wingfield in 1994. The two had first known each other as students at Arizona State College at Flagstaff in the mid-1950s. Elva built the ASU President's Community Enrichment Programs, drawing civic and business leaders into closer contact with the university, and her work helped bring in many of the donors who supported ASU's fundraising campaigns. She died on July 2, 2024, at 85.

Coor retired from ASU's presidency in 2002 but kept working. That year, at 66, he founded the Center for the Future of Arizona, a nonprofit he liked to call a "do tank" rather than a think tank, and he served as its chairman and chief executive while holding the Ernest W. McFarland Chair in Leadership and Public Policy at ASU's School of Public Affairs. "Lattie recognized the significant role private support plays in helping students, advancing research and extending the university's geographic footprint," said Gretchen Buhlig, chief executive of the ASU Foundation, in a tribute carried by AZ Big Media. ASU gave him its Sue Clark-Johnson Leadership Award in 2018, and in 2024 he published a memoir, "Growing Up in Arizona: Remembering the Past," reflecting on the state's history and his own. In it, he wrote of unfinished work: "Until we help the university and this state ensure that every background, by race, ethnicity and gender is fully represented of the mainstream of our society, we cannot rest."

Coor's name now marks buildings at both universities he led: Coor Hall on ASU's Tempe campus, dedicated in January 2004 when he and Crow cut the ribbon together, and the Coor House at the University of Vermont, dedicated in 2013. The research standing, the honors college, and the campus system he built at ASU are still in daily use by students who have never heard his name, and the Center for the Future of Arizona keeps testing the conviction he carried home to Arizona in 1990: that a state's future is something you can measure, organize for, and build, one campaign and one partnership at a time. ASU News confirmed his death at 89 on July 16, 2026.