A legacy of change from a lifelong Tiger

One autumn afternoon in 1956, a 37-year-old assistant professor in the classics department was summoned to the phone while attending a Princeton football game at Yale. The voice on the other end bore momentous news: The University’s Board of Trustees wanted him to be Princeton’s 16th president.

The following June, Robert Goheen ’40 became the third-youngest person to assume the University’s presidency.

The selection of an obscure scholar was a bold action for the Trustees to take, but their decision has since been validated several times over. For 15 years, Goheen’s decisive leadership would prove invaluable during one of the most transformative periods in Princeton’s history.

Princeton beginnings

Goheen first walked through FitzRandolph Gate when he arrived as an undergraduate in the fall of 1936, and his path to Princeton was a winding one.

He came to the University as a recent graduate of The Lawrenceville School, having grown up the son of medical missionaries in Vengurla, India.

Goheen entered Princeton intending to pursue a career in medicine but switched to classics during his freshman year on the advice of classics professor Whitney Oates ‘25.

“I’d always liked literature,” Goheen said in an interview with The Daily Princetonian last December, “and professor Oates was a wonderful professor and a really warm guy who steered me all through college and many years afterward.”

Goheen excelled in every aspect of undergraduate life and amassed an impressive list of achievements. He was an accomplished soccer player and, in 1939, was named president of the Intramural Athletic Association.

His extracurricular resume also included memberships in the Undergraduate Council, the Whig-Cliosophic Society, Phi Beta Kappa and the Quadrangle Club, where he served as president.

At Commencement, Goheen was awarded the Pyne Prize, the highest general distinction conferred upon an undergraduate, and was Latin salutatorian.

Goheen then became a graduate student at Princeton in the fall of 1940 and married Margaret Skelly the summer after that.

Three months later he was drafted into the army, where he served in the intelligence section of the 1st Cavalry Division for more than four years, attaining the rank of lieutenant colonel.

Returning to civilian life, Goheen re-enrolled in graduate school at Princeton, earning his M.A. in 1947 and his Ph.D. in 1948, both in classics.

He became an assistant professor at Princeton in 1950 and continued to teach until he was tapped for the presidency.

Leading through turbulent times

Princeton was not immune to the forces of instability that shook college campuses across the country in the 1960s. Goheen recalled that experiencing such protests firsthand was jarring.

In one instance in 1963, an angry crowd of undergraduates hanged an effigy of him outside Prospect House, then the University president’s residence. “I had never seen a student mob in action,” Goheen said. “It’s an inhuman creature. It’s scary. You look at it, and their eyes are glazed over, and they don’t look like human beings.”

While many college protests of the era focused on the Vietnam War and some led to violence, Princeton managed to avoid the open conflict that was seen on other campuses.

President Tilghman said in an interview last December that she has looked to Goheen’s handling of the period when dealing with national traumas during her own presidency.

“When 9/11 happened, I went back and read about that period because I thought we might see a period of equivalent unrest,” she said. “I was looking for wisdom about how Bob Goheen handled that very difficult time as well as he did.”

The dawn of coeducation

For all the credit Goheen received for maintaining stability on Princeton’s campus, he will likely  be remembered most for opening Princeton’s gates to women.

“Getting coeducation accepted was probably my biggest single achievement,” Goheen said last December. “It was very gratifying. The presence of women changed the character of Princeton for the better. That’s something I am proud of.” While in office, Goheen also made a serious effort to attract a more racially and ethnically diverse group of students and faculty.

Tilghman lauded Goheen’s achievement and tied it to her own status as the University’s first female president.

“I, as a woman, am here because of Bob Goheen,” she said. “He is credited, correctly, with bringing coeducation to Princeton and for bringing coeducation in a way that was accepted very quickly. And it was really due to Bob Goheen’s inherent sense that to be a great university you needed to have on its faculty, on its staff, in its student body, representatives of all parts of America.”

A lasting legacy

Goheen also played sizable role in reforming the way the University was run and is credited with creating the Office of the Provost, the Council of the Princeton University Community, the Priorities Committee and the Young Alumni Trustee position.

Goheen’s time at the University’s helm ended in March 1971, when he announced his resignation while most students were away from campus for spring break.

“I believe the time has come for someone else to enjoy the rewards and fun of the job — which really do outweigh the headaches and the anguish,” he said at the time.

Looking back, Goheen said he chose to resign after the restlessness of the 1960s had died down.

“The students who came back that fall had suddenly changed,” he said. “They were all peaceful again and were taking up their studies and were behaving the way we were used to students behaving. And we finally got the University’s budget back into balance.”

After a seven-month search, William Bowen GS ’58, the University’s first provost, was named Princeton’s 17th president in November 1971.

After retiring from the presidency, Goheen left the University and served as president of the Council on Foundations and as U.S. Ambassador to India. He returned to Princeton in 1981 and became a senior fellow of public and international affairs in the Wilson School.

For more than 70 years, Robert Goheen called Princeton home, as student and scholar, and as professor and president. Arriving in 1936 as a 17-year-old freshman, it can be argued that he never really left.