Frank Aydelotte (1880–1956) was a U.S. educator. His full name was Franklin Ridgeway Aydelotte. He is known for redefining Swarthmore College as an institution while he was president between 1921 and 1940 and was also the director of the Institute for Advanced Study from 1939 until 1947.
Aydelotte was born in a small town in Gibson County, Indiana, the son of James Ridgeway Aydelotte and Cynthia Ann (Hollingsworth) Aydelotte, and attended Indiana University where he was an English major, a member of the Sigma Nu fraternity, earned a varsity letter in football and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1911. After graduation he became an English professor first at a teaching college in California, Pennsylvania, then at Vincennes University and Louisville Male High School in Louisville, Kentucky. He became one of the first Rhodes Scholars and studied at Brasenose College, Oxford University.
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By 1921 Aydelotte was president of Swarthmore College where he successfully blended the educational processes he learned at Oxford with the traditional Hicksite Quaker values the college was founded on. He expanded the college to an economically viable size and developed a broad-based liberal arts educational curriculum that stressed academic excellence.
He is known for introducing the Honors program at Swarthmore, a program based on his experiences at Oxford. The system is based on the premise that the only true education is self-education, and the idea was to create a set of seminar courses for selected students that were more challenging than the regular curriculum. These students would not receive grades or examinations, but would receive oral examinations at the end of the senior year given by external examiners. This replaced the lecture method of teaching for the advanced students, and introduced the notion of the students reaching the faculty. This method of teaching has become the signature of a Swarthmore College education.
During Aydelotte's time as director of the Institute for Advanced Study (1939–1947) the institute had many notable faculty including: Albert Einstein, Kurt Gödel, John von Neumann and J. W. Alexander. He also wrote The American Rhodes Scholarships;: A review of the first forty years that reviews the seven wills of Cecil Rhodes the creation of the Rhodes-Milner Round Table Groups from the first and the Rhodes Scholarships from the last.
Aydelotte was a member of the Anglo-American committee that recommended Britain allow significantly more Jews to emigrate to Palestine after World War II.