Elvis Jacob Stahr Jr. (March 9, 1916 – November 11, 1998) was an American government official and college president and administrator. After graduating from the University of Kentucky in 1936 as a member of Sigma Chi and Pershing Rifles, he attended Merton College at the University of Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. He served as lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army during World War II. He returned to the University of Kentucky and became a professor and then dean of the College of Law, before becoming president of West Virginia University. He served as the United States Secretary of the Army between 1961 and 1962 and served as president of Indiana University from 1962 to 1968. He was the president of the National Audubon Society from 1968 until 1981. Early life Stahr was born in 1916 in Hickman, Kentucky to Hon. Elvis Stahr, a Fulton County, Kentucky judge and his wife Mary McDaniel Stahr. At age 16, he entered the University of Kentucky, where he achieved the highest academic average in the history of the university. He graduated Omicron Delta Kappa in 1936, and was a member of Sigma Chi and the National Society of Pershing Rifles, a Reserve Officer Training Corps fraternal organization. He attended Merton College, Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship where he studied law. He was known at Oxford as "the Colonel" and resisted assuming British affectations. He practiced law in New York, then received a diploma in Chinese from Yale University. He served in combat units in China during World War II as a United States Army lieutenant colonel. Early career Stahr practiced law in New York after the war, and in 1946 married Dorothy Howland Berkfield, a New York City debutante. In 1947 he became a law professor at the University of Kentucky. He was named dean of the University of Kentucky College of Law and served until 1956. With University President and Justice Thurgood Marshall, he helped desegregate the law school. During the Korean War, he took a 16-month leave of absence to serve as special assistant to Secretary of the Army Frank Pace Jr. In 1956, Stahr was staff director of President Dwight D. Eisenhower's Commission on Education Beyond High School. He was vice chancellor at the University of Pittsburgh in 1957 and 1958, and then was president of West Virginia University until nominated as Secretary of the Army by President John F.