Aydelotte, Frank, 1880-1956

Frank Aydelotte, seventh President of Swarthmore College, was born on October 18, 1880 in Sullivan, Indiana; he was the first president of the College who was not a Quaker. He received his B.A. degree from the University of Indiana in 1900, and three years later received an M.A. from Harvard. He became a Rhodes Scholar and studied at Oxford University from 1905-1907. He then taught at University of Indiana from 1908-1915. Afterward he taught English Literature at M.I.T. where he worked until he became President of Swarthmore College in 1921. He remained active in the Rhodes Scholars Program while at Swarthmore; he was Secretary to the Rhodes Trustees and was responsible for the administration of Rhodes Scholarships in the United States until 1953. One of his goals was to implement the accelerated education he received at Oxford into an Honors Program, initiated during the second year of his presidency. The success of the Honors Program was largely due to his raising the intellectual level of the college as a whole by creating competition among applicants. He greatly increased the school's endowment and began to downplay some of the more social aspects of college life. Aydelotte resigned from the presidency in 1940 and assumed a variety of other jobs, including becoming Director of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. Frank Aydelotte died on December 17, 1956.