Alfred Whitney Griswold

Alfred Whitney Griswold (October 27, 1906 – April 19, 1963) was an American historian and educator. He served as 16th president of Yale University from 1951 to 1963, during which he built much of Yale's modern scientific research infrastructure, especially on Science Hill. Early life Griswold was born in Morristown, New Jersey, the son of Elsie Montgomery (Whitney) and Harold Ely Griswold. He graduated from Hotchkiss School in 1925, before obtaining his B.A. from Yale University in 1929, where he edited campus humor magazine The Yale Record. A member of the Griswold family, he was a descendant, on his mother's side, of Eli Whitney, and of six colonial governors of Connecticut on his father's side. As an undergraduate, Griswold, along with a handful of students and faculty members, founded the Yale Political Union. Career He taught English for a year, then changed to history, which he taught at Yale from 1933, becoming an assistant professor in 1938, an associate professor in 1942, and a full professor in 1947. Griswold received a Ph.D. in the new field of history, the arts and letters, writing the first dissertation in American studies in 1933. The American cult of success was the dissertation's subject, informed in part by Griswold's brief time on Wall Street between his graduation and the stock market crash of 1929. Griswold authored The Far Eastern Policy of the United States (1938), Farming and Democracy (1948), Essays on Education (1954), In the University Tradition (1957), and Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal (1959). Although Griswold He previously had shown little interest in world affairs, but in 1935 he joined the Yale Institute of International Studies and turned his attention to the history of foreign policy, working with Samuel Flagg Bemis. Bemis however was a specialist on Latin America, so for insight on the Far East Griswold relied heavily on books by Tyler Dennett. His 1938 book on Far Eastern policy was an elegantly written and vigorous survey which for many years was the most influential work in the field. He had changed from being an ardent internationalist in his undergraduate years to becoming a non-interventionist in the late 1930s—he avoided calling himself an isolationist because of its negative connotations. He was an ardent liberal New Dealer, and feared that involvement in world affairs would lead to war and war would undermine American liberalism.