John Edward Sawyer was born in Worcester, Massachusetts 5 May 1917 and died in Woods Hole, Massachusetts 7 February 1995. He attended Deerfield Academy, obtained an A.B. degree from Williams College in 1939 and earned an A.M. degree from Harvard. In 1942 he left Harvard before completing his Ph. D. dissertation to serve as an officer in the U.S. Navy assigned to the Office of Strategic Services. He then returned to Harvard as a Junior Fellow (1946-1949) and as an Assistant Professor (1949-1953). He was an Associate Professor at Yale University (1953-1961) before becoming President of Williams College (1961-1973). In 1974 he became Vice President of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and served as its President from 1975 until his retirement in 1987. During Sawyer's tenure as president of Williams, every aspect of the college was transformed, significantly including the replacement of fraternities with dormitory clusters. Sawyer also experimented with more flexible admissions criteria, ended compulsory attendance for the classroom and the chapel, and created the offices of Provost and Dean of the Faculty. In the mid-1960s he took the lead in revising the curriculum, including the establishment of the first center for environmental studies at the college level and expanding the recruitment of women and minorities for faculty and administration positions. He helped create the Twelve College Exchange Program, engineered the change to coeducation, and was one of the leaders in establishing the New England Small College Athletic Conference. Sawyer's presidency saw two protest actions. In 1969 Black students staged a sit-in to protest deficiencies in the curriculum, in social and cultural events, and in admissions as they related to Afro-American concerns; in May 1970 protests over the U.S. government's military actions in Cambodia led to the canceling of the last two weeks of classes and the suspension or postponement of final exams.
From the description of Papers, 1924-1995. (Williams College). WorldCat record id: 298984053
