Goheen, Class of 1961 Launch New Careers

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 President Goheen’s administration — and the class of 1961 the first to come under the tutelage of the 37-year-old president.

The election of the former assistant professor of classic late last fall to one of the top university presidential posts in the world came as a complete surprise to the nation, the press, alumni, faculty and students alike.

President Harold W. Dodds had announced in September that he would retire in June of 1957 after 24 years of service as Princeton’s 15th president.

Stevenson Considered

Speculation on his successor had run anywhere from two-time Democratic presidential nominee Adlai E. Stevenson ’22 to the chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. Also “under consideration” were thought to be the presidents of Oberlin (Stevenson’s cousin William E. ’22) and Amherst, the Dean of Faculty of the College of Fine Arts at Harvard and several prominent members of Princeton’s own faculty.

However, the University Trustees shied away from drafting a “big name” president as had been the unhappy experience of Columbia with Eisenhower and Pennsylvania with Stassen.

Instead, the trustees stuck with tradition and selected a young president who came from the ranks of its own “Princeton Family” and who had a Protestant clerical background — Goheen’s father and grandfather had been Presbyterian medical missionaries in India.

The result was a man who was virtually unknown outside the university and whose name both students and alumni alike were a bit confused at first in pronouncing, but whose forte had been excellent scholarship and administrative abilities, not headlines: Robert Francis Goheen ’40.

Born in India, Goheen came to Princeton in 1936. He compiled a .99 average for the second highest in his class, was named a junior Phi Beta Kappa, elected president of his eating club, Quadrangle, and subsequently chosen head of the Interclub Committee, an organization consisting of the 17 club presidents who meet to discuss and act upon club problems and the Bicker.

The president also won his letter in soccer and shared the M. Taylor Pyne Prize — highest award to a member of the senior class who has “most clearly manifested the qualifications of excellent scholarship, manly qualities and effective support of the best interests of Princeton University.”

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Drafted out of the Princeton Graduate School just before Pearl Harbor, Goheen rose from buck private to lieutenant colonel as an intelligence office in the Pacific Theater.

Out in 1945, Goheen was undecided on the State Department or teaching as a career. He then ran into his former thesis advisor in the Classics Department, Whitney J. Oates ’25, who was in the process of establishing the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program — designed to recruit outstanding students for higher education. Goheen was offered and accepted one of the first four scholarships.

Goheen subsequently took his Ph.D. in classics in 1948, was appointed an instructor the same year in several upperclass Greek courses, then became an assistant professor in 1950. An Arthur H. Scribner Bicentennial Preceptorship saw him in Rome as a Senior Fellow in Classics at the American Academy for two years. Then, back in the States, Goheen assumed his three-year directorship of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Program — revealing a brilliant administrative ability in addition to his previous scholarship and teaching eminence — just the qualifications which the Princeton trustees were looking for last fall.

This fall, Goheen takes over the helm from President Dodds on the eve of what may prove to be the greatest era in the university’s history.

The country is in an age of unmatched prosperity. The international situation seems quiet for the near future, annual alumni giving continues to boom, the curriculum has been greatly deepened and enriched under President Dodds, and a great expansion program is under way on campus, enrollment is bulging and the university’s rating has climbed from a “country club” to one of the top institutions in the nation.

Diametrically opposed to this 1957 background was that behind the whole Dodds Administration.

Dr. Dodds, a graduate from Grove City (Pa.) College and from the Princeton Graduate School, had headed the School of Public and International Affairs until his appointment to the presidency in 1933. His first task: pull Princeton through the depression.

With enrollment and endowment pulled back to normal, Dodds next helped Princeton adjust to the rise of Fascism throughout the world and the Second World War, the Korean War and the post-Korean inflation period.

Today, however, the problems facing Dr. Goheen appear to be more domestic in nature and more inherent to the Princeton scene itself. Expansion of the physical plant, undergraduate college and the grad school; adjustment in the Bicker; and possible adoption of the House System to meet the over-crowded dormitory situation and to house “the alternate facility” represent the major type of problems facing Princeton today.