Dean Seymour Named Eleventh President of Wabash College
THADDEUS SEYMOUR, Dean of the College, has been named the eleventh president of Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and will take office on August 1. Dean Seymour had announced last year that he was relinquishing the Dartmouth deanship in June, after ten years, in order to return to teaching in the English Department, in which he holds the rank of full professor.
Wabash College, a liberal arts men's college founded in 1832, is one of the oldest private colleges in the midwest. From its beginning Wabash has had strong ties with Dartmouth. One of its founders was Edmund O. Hovey, Class of 1828, a native of Hanover, who was the college's first treasurer and a member of its faculty for 43 years. The first man appointed to the Wabash College faculty was Caleb Mills, Dartmouth 1829. Louis B. Hopkins, brother of President Ernest Martin Hopkins of Dartmouth, was president of Wabash from 1926 to 1940.
Dean Seymour succeeds Dr. Paul W. Cook Jr., whose resignation was effective in September 1968. Since that time Francis W. Misch, Wabash trustee and retired vice president of Chrysler Corporation, has been acting president of the college.
In announcing the selection of Dean Seymour, John P. Collett, chairman of the Wabash board of trustees, said, "In the selection of Dr. Thaddeus Seymour as the new president of Wabash College, the Board of Trustees is confident that it has found a man who is eminently qualified, both by his background as a teacher and college administrator and by his qualities as a man."
President Dickey of Dartmouth also paid tribute to Dean Seymour, saying, "Dean Seymour and his wonderful wife, Polly, have built ten years of hard work, unstinting devotion, and shared fun into the heritage of this college and into the lives of thousands of Dartmouth men. We are all grateful that they will always be a part of this place and our best wishes will always be with them."
Dean Seymour attended Princeton University for two years and was graduated from the University of California at Berkeley in 1950. As a graduate student and teaching fellow at the University of North Carolina he specialized in 18th Century literature. He received an M.A. degree from the University in 1951 and his doctorate in 1955. He received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Wilkes College in 1968.
Dean Seymour joined the Dartmouth faculty in 1954 as an instructor in English, and taught a writing course and a senior seminar in addition to being director of a writing clinic for two years. He became assistant professor in 1956, associate professor in 1959, the year he became Dean of the College, and full professor in 1967. He served as coach of the Dartmouth crew for three seasons and has been active in Hanover Republican politics and in a multitude of community programs. He and his wife, the former Polly Gnagy of Wichita, Kansas, have three daughters.
The Greater Boston Alumni Association paid their respects to Dean Seymour at its annual dinner on February 13. In his valedictory to the Boston alumni, Dean Seymour expressed his faith in today's young people and offered some advice to their elders. "Our students today have a great moral concern - greater than any time that I've experienced. And I'll stand on this quality as sound grounds for optimism for the future ... If I have any message, it is to keep listening to our students, keep taking them seriously and treating them with respect, and to realize that they are seeking what Dartmouth has always stood for - to find out what is right and to do it. . . .It is important to try to find ways in which students who really want to make a difference in their society can put their idealism constructively to work." It is certain that Dean Seymour will continue to follow his own advice as president of Wabash College.
Dean Seymour (l), who was guest ofhonor at a Boston alumni dinner February 13, receives a silver Paul Revere bowlfrom club president Robert O'Brien '41.
