President Emeritus Dr. Curtis Martin, whose career and influence spanned more than 30 years at Seattle Pacific, passed away Monday, July 13, 2026, at the age of 93. In this story we look back at his time as a student through serving as the seventh president of SPU.
In the summer of 1951, with his high school diploma firmly in hand, 18-year-old Curtis Martin eyed his future with a furrowed brow.
“As a freshman-to-be at Seattle Pacific College, I needed $130 for first quarter tuition,” he recalled. “I was going to struggle to pay my bill. I was not all that sure college was for me.”
Yet come fall, Martin was off to morning classes while working part time as a custodian for McKinley Hall. The pay: 75 cents an hour. Over the next four years, Martin’s Seattle Pacific experience would prove to be priceless. Professors like Phillip Ashton in psychology, Burton Beegle in mathematics, and Vivian Larson in education, already classroom legends, deepened Martin’s love of learning and shaped his Christian character.
“At Ivy Cutting, that grand tradition at Seattle Pacific prior to my Commencement, I remembered how beautiful everything seemed,” he recalled many years later. Earning his bachelor’s degree in 1955, Martin became the first person in his family to graduate from college.
“Soon after Commencement,” he recalls, “I loaded everything I owned into a 1948 Packard and together with my bride, Carol, headed off to seminary in New York City. I wondered if I would ever return to Seattle Pacific.” Along with his new wife and a sprawling Rand-McNalley Road atlas, Providence remained at Martin’s side.
Following a seminary degree in New York City, and a faculty post at Hamlin University in St. Paul, Minnesota, Martin returned to Seattle Pacific to teach in the School of Education.
Martin’s effectiveness as a teacher is noted in the SPU history book A Growing Vision: “His classes crowded out the classrooms — not because they were easy, rather, he was challenging and stimulating.” He soon earned an MEd and a PhD in Education from the University of Washington.
Martin’s leadership eventually reached outside the classroom. While serving under SPU presidents David McKenna and David Le Shana into the 1970s and early 1980s, he took on new job titles for his growing responsibilities and leadership within the University.
With ambition and a heart of service, Martin revitalized Seattle Pacific’s summer school program with faculty members including Professor of English Bill Rearick. Savvy and strategic marketing also enabled Seattle Pacific to reach and equip thousands of primary and secondary school educators in the continuing education program SPIRAL (Seattle Pacific in Reaching All Learners). The program became one of the largest continuing education program offerings for teachers in Washington state.
His leadership was key to other significant university achievements, including:
- Expanding the University’s FELLOWS organization
- Developing the Otto Miller Science Learning Center
- Launching the Seattle Pacific Foundation
Martin, along with then President David McKenna, established the Foundation shortly after Seattle Pacific College became Seattle Pacific University in 1976. He served as the Foundation’s first president from 1979 to 1981, and was responsible for recruiting Seattle-area business leaders as board members. Today, the Foundation works to endow the future of Seattle Pacific by achieving investment returns that help lower the cost of attendance for undergraduate students who receive scholarships and financial aid each year.
These and other important initiatives were realized because of the laser-focused accountability Martin required. Former Board of Trustees Chair Bud McDole credited Martin for being “not only equal to every challenge and task but also keeping his co-laborers fully alert in theirs.”
With the resignation of President Le Shana, Martin was named provost/CEO and shortly afterward the Board of Trusteees named him president. Four decades after his freshman year in college, Curtis Martin said yes to the greatest opportunity to serve by becoming the first graduate in the history of his alma mater to be named president of Seattle Pacific University.
From his new office in Demaray Hall, Martin had the forward-thinking perspective to look back to the classroom: “Nearly 40 years ago, [while I was] a college freshman in physics class, Professor Otto Miller introduced me to the concept of inertia, ‘the tendency for things to remain as they are.’ Because of inertia, it takes energy to get stationary objects to move. But once they do begin to move, inertia is transformed into momentum.”
As president, Martin befriended momentum. During his intentional three-years term he oversaw a string of strategic initiatives to advance Seattle Pacific as a leading Christian university:
- Completing Seattle Pacific’s $25 million Second Century campaign including construction of the University’s new Ames Library and 325 spaces of adjacent parking for faculty, staff, and visitors.
- Undergirding the endowment of the Paul T. Walls Chair in Biblical and Wesleyan Studies and two professorships — the Joseph C. Hope Professorship in Leadership and Ethics, and the C. May Marston Professorship in Classics.
- Securing the grant for a new outdoor student athletic facility.
“Curt was my boss for many years until his retirement, and I fondly remember those days of working for and with him,” said former Vice President of Business and Finance Don Mortensen. “He was one of the smartest people in a group of very intelligent people at SPU. He was a mentor and always a strategic thinker and he could read a person’s skills and weaknesses with amazing perception.”
John Glancy, another longtime staff member, said Martin was focused on promoting the uniqueness of SPU. “Student, professor, administrator, president. Curtis Martin put his unique stamp of entrepreneurial vitality at each position during his tenure at Seattle Pacific,” said Glancy. “He was a creator, promoter, and calculated risk-taker with one goal in mind: ensuring Seattle Pacific would always offer the best in Christian higher education.”
Current SPU President Deana Porterfield said, “Curtis Martin’s tireless work touched on almost all aspects of the University: academic innovation, campus ministry, budget, accreditation, fundraising, relationship to the Free Methodist Church, community relations, mission, and workplace culture.”
Martin Square, located on upper campus in front the library, honors the University’s seventh president whose three children — Sharon Martin Phillips ’79, Jeffrey Martin ’82, and Andrew Martin ’88 — also earned their bachelor’s degrees from Seattle Pacific. Today, they can look out across the courtyard that bears their father’s name. And there, etched into stone to ponder and pray, are words of Scripture, divine wisdom that a certain young incoming freshman in 1951 would have read and taken to heart: “Apply your heart to instruction and your ears to words of knowledge.” Proverbs 23:12.
Toward the end of his presidency in 1994, Martin reflected: “As conspicuous believers, we can reflect the light of Christ exactly as the moon reflects the sun. In a word, we too can be a light in the world. The best way for us to move forward into our individual futures is to remember that we have, as believers in Christ, been called to serve others. It is as we intentionally lose our lives in such service that we will find the fulfillment that Jesus promises to those who do His will.”
At his retirement dinner, Martin said farewell to his university family: “I care very much for Seattle Pacific. I am thrilled to have been a part of its ongoing story. I hope, in God’s goodness, that I live to see the day when some of our fondest dreams for this place becoming a truly great Christian university area realized.”
