Barnes, Earl, 1861-1935

Professor of Education at Stanford (1891-1897). Born 15 July 1861 in New York, married to Mary Sheldon Barnes, who also taught at Stanford. Free-lance lecturer and writer. Died 29 May 1935.

BIOGRAPHY

Earl Barnes was born in Martville, New York, on July 15, 1861. He married Mary Sheldon (b. 1850) in either 1884 or 1885 while he was still in school. Barnes received an A.B. from Indiana University in 1889 and an M.S. from Cornell in 1891. He held a position as Professor of History at Indiana University in 1889. When David Starr Jordan was appointed President of Stanford University in 1891, he took Earl Barnes with him as Professor of Education. Barnes and his wife Mary Sheldon Barnes taught at Stanford until 1897, when Barnes was asked by Jordan to resign. Jordan had discovered that Barnes had been involved in an extramarital love affair, conduct which the President of Stanford University could not tolerate in one of his faculty members. Barnes and wife went to Europe, where Mary Sheldon Barnes died in 1898. In 1900 Barnes remarried; his second wife was Anna Kohler, by whom he had four children --Joseph, Howard, Bernard, and Mary. After leaving Stanford Barnes never again held a position in an American university. He was appointed staff lecturer, London Society for Extension of University Teaching for the year 1900-01, but after that supported himself as a free-lance lecturer and writer. During his later years he resided in New Hartford, Connecticut, where he died on May 29, 1935.

His major publications are: Studies in Education, 2v. 1897 Where Knowledge Fails, 1907 Women in Modern Society, 1912 Psychology of Childhood and Youth, 1914.