Former U. President Robert Goheen '40 1919-2008

Former University President Robert Goheen ’40, who steered Princeton through the tumult of the 1960s and oversaw dramatic changes, including the implementation of coeducation, died of heart failure yesterday morning at the University Medical Center at Princeton. He was 88.Widely regarded as Princeton’s most influential president since Woodrow Wilson, Class ...

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 ...

The late 1960s were not an easy time to be the president of the University. The war, and the efforts of some to stop it, fractured the Princeton community in a way that people can’t imagine today. Moreover, it had become increasingly clear that Princeton would need to admit women ...

Among the many good things I could say about Bob Goheen, perhaps the most telling is that II cannot recall meeting anyone who didn’t like him: He was a nice guy, a good one, too. He squinted out over those half-glasses which, at that time, I had only seen on ...

Monday, June 10, 1957 When Princeton’s President Robert F. Goheen ’40 steps to the rostrum in Alexander Hall this fall to greet the class of 1961, a new era in the university’s 211-year history will be launched. For this coming academic year of 1957-58 will be the first to fall under ...

Thursday, March 25, 1971 In the fall of 1956 Robert Francis Goheen ’40, then a promising assistant professor of classics, met with a group of top-level trustees in a home near Princeton. He had been asked to present to them a report on the general needs of Princeton’s younger faculty. Goheen ...

One of the pleasures of the Princeton experience is never knowing when or where you might happen upon a piece of history. The richness of the past may be found in the architecture of a particular building or in a tattered old text on a shelf in Firestone. Sometimes, if ...