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Secretary-Treasurer
Ken Megill is President of Knowledge Application Services, (http://www.knowledge-applications-services.com) a Washington based minority owned information company fownded by Lawrence Tan and himself providing corporate memory management and knowledge store management services. He is also a co-owner of Straits of Malaya and Larry's Lounge and is active in its management.
He was born in Esbon, Kansas, a tiny town located in the geographic center of the continental United States. He grew up in small Kansas rural towns where his parents, both ordained ministers, worked to save vanishing communities as farms grew in size and children and youth left because there was no future for them. He grew up in an environment where hard work was expected and started his work life at the age of six delivering papers to neighbors. After attending four different high schools, he was recruited into the honors program at the University of Kansas. He was initially active in debate and public speaking (he had been the Kansas gold medal winner in extemporaneous speaking during this senior year in high school), but his interests gravitated to political issues and philosophy.
In 1957 he was selected to be a member of the first student exchange group to Soviet Union, where he spent forty days living with Soviet youth who had never met anyone from outside their country. Upon his return he spoke to many local groups about his experience while urging an end to the cold war. He was awarded a Woodrow Wilon Fellowship for graduate study, as well as two student exchange fellowships to study at Mainz and Berlin universities in Germany. He graduated form Yale University at the age of 26 with a Ph.D. and no debt, thanks to fellowships and the National Defense Education Act, even though he received no financial support from his parents during his schooling.
He was recruited to join the faculty at the University of Florida in 1966, receiving the highest starting salary for Yale graduates in philosophy. His six years at the university were tumultuous and he became a national leader in opposition to the war in Vietnam and for the end of racial discrimination in the South and the university. In 1968 he was the first National Humanities Fellow from the University of Kansas and spent eight months at the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences in Budapest, Hungary. While there he wrote his first book, The New Democratic Theory, where he articulated the vision of those in both the East and West for a democratic society.
In 1972, the President of the University of Florida rejected the recommendation of all faculty committees and fired him. His removal from the university attracted national attention and resulted in the formation of a faculty union, which he organized and led. In 1976, 8,000 faculty and professional employees in the State University System of Florida voted to unionize. Ken Megill led the several-year struggle and negotiated the first state-wide contract. The union still survives as the only higher education union a right-to-work State. He continued to be active politically and inside the national academic union movement. In 1982, after leading a successful effort to move the union from one national organization to another, he left Florida and moved to Washington, D.C. He spent several years working for various organizations before returning to the university in 1986 where he received a Master of Library Science from the Catholic University of America. Since then he has been a working certified records manager and certified archivist, served on the faculty at his alma mater, and published five books on records and information management. Since 1989, he has participated in the active management of the Straits of Malaya, the restaurant founded by his partner, Lawrence Tan.
Further information on Ken Megill is available on his web site at http://mysite.verizon.net/ken.megill/