Dr. Frank Canon Williams

Frank Canon Williams, 84 passed away on Thursday, July 8, 2021 at the U.K. Bluegrass Hospice Center in Lexington. He was the husband of Carolyn Antonides Williams.

The EKU community mourns the passing of longtime EKU Professor of Philosophy and pioneer of the EKU Honors Program Dr. Frank Williams on July 8, 2021. A native of Mississippi, Dr. Williams earned Bachelor’s degrees from Georgia Tech and Southwestern Baptist Seminary before completing his Ph.D. at Duke University. He then taught at Emory University and Berea College before coming to EKU’s Department of Philosophy in 1973. He remained a pillar of the EKU faculty for four decades.

In the 1970s to supplement classroom teaching of informal logic, Dr. Williams pioneered the use of computer lessons that could be used as homework assignments. In the early 1980s he applied for and was awarded a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop a far more extensive series of such lessons for personal computers. Wadsworth Publishing for several years distributed these lessons with its textbooks for informal logic. In the mid-1980s, he was among the campus leaders in advocating for and designing the EKU Honors Program, which was established in 1988. For the next quarter century, Dr. Williams was an active member of the EKU Honors Program’s core faculty, and he taught the first-semester Honors Rhetoric course every fall from its first iteration in 1988 until his retirement 2013.

He was particularly instrumental in securing and implementing a series of grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities that proved vital to the development of the first generation of EKU Honors Program faculty and curriculum. He and his wife Dr. Carolyn Antonides Williams—longtime Dean of the College of Nursing at the University of Kentucky—are well known in the education community not only as accomplished educators, but also as animal lovers and rescuers of many stray cats and dogs. Dr. Williams’ legacy and his impact on EKU’s Philosophy Department and Honors Program are enormous, and he will be sorely missed. We express deepest sympathy and condolences to his wife and to friends, colleagues, and alumni across the EKU community.