Robert Halli, founding dean of the University of Alabama’s Honors College, dies at 78

BIRMINGHAM, Ala. ( WIAT ) — Robert Halli, a longtime educator at the University of Alabama who was the first dean of its Honors College, died Monday. He was 78.

Halli, who first came to the university in 1972, had been a professor in the English department for nearly 30 years before he was tapped to lead the Honors College in 2002. Before then, the university had had a plan since the 1980s to combine its three honors programs under one roof, allowing top-performing students to take more personalized coursework and study in lieu of standard courses.

Within a couple of years, enrollment at the Honors College had already grown to nearly 1,700.

“We’re bigger than most of the other colleges,” Halli told The Tuscaloosa News in 2005 .

As a professor, Halli taught courses covering subjects like English Renaissance literature, the detective novel and ballads and folksongs. The latter inspired Halli to compile the research of UA music professor Byron Arnold into the book “ An Alabama Songbook: Ballads, Folksongs and Spirituals ,” in 2004, which collected Arnold’s recordings of 200 songs he had collected in the 1940’s, including “lullabies, Civil War anthems, African-American gospel and secular songs, fiddle tunes, temperance songs, love ballads, play-party rhymes, and work songs.”

In 2009, Halli retired from the Honors College, but continued to be involved through academia through UA’s Harry Truman Scholarship, as well as teaching different courses in the UA in Oxford program each summer. He was also a board member at the Kentuck Art Festival.

Among his many accolades, Halli was a recipient of the Morris Lehman Mayer Award, the Outstanding Commitment to Students Award and the Outstanding Commitment to Teaching Award.

Services have not been announced yet.

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