David Truman

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

David Bicknell Truman (1913-2003) was a political scientist and educator who spent much of his career at Columbia University before becoming president of Mount Holyoke College.

He was born and raised in Evanston, Illinois; he took his bachelor's degree from Amherst and his doctorate at the University of Chicago. He taught at a number of institutions before joining the Columbia faculty in 1951. There, addition to teaching political science, he undertook a number of administrative roles, serving successively as head of the department of public law and government (1959-61), Dean of Columbia College (1962-67), and Vice-President & Provost (1967-69).

As an administrator, Truman was popular with students and faculty, who praised his good humor, frankness, and willingness to listen. In 1968, he was widely spoken of as the natural successor to Columbia's outgoing president, Grayson L. Kirk. However, he was embroiled that year in the Columbia crisis of 1968, which thrust him into unpleasant publicity. In retrospect, commentators do not assign him much blame for the debacle, considering his position — trapped between intemperate rioters and an administration far out-of-touch with reality, which often put him forward as its public face — an impossible one. Nonetheless, Truman resigned in the aftermath and left Columbia.

Later that year (1969), Truman became president of Mount Holyoke College, the oldest women's college in the country, not far from Truman's alma mater Amherst College. He led Mount Holyoke until 1978, during years which saw the college reaffirm its commitment to single-sex education, admit more minority students, and adapt to societal changes. He was a generally popular and fondly remembered president at Mount Holyoke.

As a political scientist, his most famous works are Administrative Decentralization (1940), The Governmental Process (1951), and The Congressional Party (1959), which are still sometimes used today as canonical textbooks. In his later years he also wrote extensively on higher education.