Lester, Robert M. (Robert MacDonald), 1889-1969

Teacher; foundation administrator and consultant.

Robert MacDonald Lester (1889-1969) was an author, teacher and employee of the Carnegie Institute of New York. His published works include Forty Years of Carnegie Giving (1941). Lester was also the recording secretary of the Council of Southern Universities and executive director of the Southern Fellowships Fund.

Foundation executive.

Robert MacDonald Lester (1888-1969) was an author, teacher and employee of the Carnegie Institute of New York.

His published works include Forty Years of Carnegie Giving (1941).

Teacher, education scholar, and philanthropy executive Robert M. Lester was born in Center, Alabama, on November 7, 1889. He received degrees from Birmingham Southern College and Vanderbilt University. He became a teacher and later superintendent of schools in Mayfield, Kentucky, and then served in the Army during World War I. Lester taught and served as an administrator at Columbia University, and in 1934 was elected Secretary of the Carnegie Corporation and the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in New York. Lester served on a variety of educational boards and foundations, and counted among his achievements an appointment as a trustee of American University in 1941. In 1954, he left the Carnegie Corporation to become executive director of the Southern Fellowships Fund of the Council of Southern Universities, Inc., a position he held until 1968.

Lester wrote and spoke frequently on issues relating to education, libraries, and philanthropic programs. He published several books and articles relating to his work with the Carnegie Corporation, the Southern Fellowship Fund, and other fundraising organizations, including the well-received Forty Years of Carnegie Giving: A Summary of the Benefactions of Andrew Carnegie and of the Work of the Philanthropic Trusts Which He Created (New York: C. Scribner's Sons, 1941).

Lester resided on East 52nd Street near First Avenue in Manhattan from the 1930s through the early 1950s. As an amateur photographer, he pointed his camera toward the radical changes in the face of the city just blocks from his home where the United Nations Headquarters complex was undergoing construction between 1947 and 1954.

Robert M. Lester died in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, on February 21, 1969, after a brief illness.