William Bowen, Influential Higher-Ed Thinker and President of Princeton and Mellon, Dies at 83

David Lubarsky

William G. Bowen, the longtime president of Princeton University and the Andrew M. Mellon Foundation, died on Thursday at the age of 83. Over the course of six decades in and around academe, Mr. Bowen gained a reputation as a rare giant — a higher-education thought leader long before that phrase had entered common parlance.

By 1972, when as Princeton’s provost he ascended to its presidency at the tender age of 38, Mr. Bowen was widely recognized as an expert on the economics of education, nonprofit organizations, and the performing arts. Still, he faced alumni opposition early in his tenure: Economists were not yet common choices as campus leaders, and Mr. Bowen was seen as an outsider because he had earned his undergraduate degree at Denison University, not Princeton.

Then there was the matter of coeducation. As provost, Mr. Bowen had been a strong advocate for the university’s controversial decision to admit women as undergraduates, in 1969. As president, he graduated the first class of female students. Embracing coeducation was one of several ways in which Mr. Bowen set about “guiding the campus through a painful transition from centuries-old customs to more modern ways, both managerially and socially,” as The New York Times put it in a 1987 article.

He also organized many of the university’s dormitories into an Oxford-style system of residential colleges. The move, also unpopular with many alumni, was modeled after the unrealized turn-of-the-20th-century vision of Woodrow Wilson, then Princeton’s president.

That was just Mr. Bowen’s first act. In 1988 he left Princeton to become president of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the nation’s leading supporters of the humanities and arts. He drove the foundation to sponsor the creation of JSTOR and Artstor, two widely used electronic archives, and Ithaka, a nonprofit group that studies and supports the use of technology in higher education. Mr. Bowen served as Mellon’s president until 2006.

Yet those leadership roles do not capture the greatest piece of Mr. Bowen’s influence on academe. “Bill really had three careers in higher education, because he was this great leader of Princeton University, this great leader of the Mellon Foundation,” said Michael S. McPherson, president of the Spencer Foundation, “and then he had — simultaneous with those two careers and separately — a career writing about higher education.”

Academe’s Conscience

It was as an author that Mr. Bowen fully made his mark as one of academe’s consciences — and, often, as one of its most influential gadflies. In some 20 books over nearly four decades, he assayed higher education from a strikingly wide range of vantage points, often predicting, if not activating, tectonic shifts in the industry.

William G. Bowen on Higher Education

He was a higher-education economist who published a series of important books and reports on the challenges facing colleges. He also wrote frequently for The Chronicle. Here’s a selection.

• Bill Bowen: Man of Achievement
• The Legacy of William Bowen
• The Painful Lessons of Sweet Briar and Cooper Union
• Toward a Shared Vision of Shared Governance
• Walk Deliberately, Don’t Run, Toward Online Education

In 1989’s Prospects for Faculty in the Arts and Sciences, Mr. Bowen and Julie Ann Sosa, a recent Princeton graduate, predicted that a spate of retirements would soon lead to an intense demand for new faculty members. (That forecast, alas, didn’t hold.) In 1998’s The Shape of the River, a pivotal salvo in the affirmative-action debate, Mr. Bowen and Derek Bok, the former Harvard president, argued that race-conscious admissions had helped strengthen the black middle class. In 2001’s The Game of Life: College Sports and Educational Values, Mr. Bowen and James L. Shulman sounded an alarm over what they saw as the deepening isolation of athletes at the nation’s top colleges.

Mr. Bowen was a powerful thinker and an eager collaborator, according to Mr. McPherson, who was a co-author, with Mr. Bowen and Matthew M. Chingos, of 2009’s Crossing the Finish Line: Completing College at America’s Public Universities. “I once described writing a book with Bill like being strapped to the outside of the space shuttle when it was launching,” he said.

And Mr. Bowen embraced his role as an éminence grise. Toward the end of his time at the Mellon Foundation’s top job, he led a group that evaluated Duke University’s response to a 2006 lacrosse scandal. In 2013, at the tender age of 79, he was named by The Chronicle as one of the year’s 10 Tech Innovators for his repeated calls for restraint and solid evidence at a time of technological evangelism.

The following year, amid a season of commencement-speech disruptions, he filled in as Haverford College’s speaker after students led protests against the initial choice, a former chancellor of the University of California at Berkeley. Mr. Bowen used his address to criticize students who sought to pre-emptively shut down speakers, urging them instead to “protest in civil and nondisruptive ways.”

Campuses “should be crossroads where diverse points of view can be heard and debated,” Mr. Bowen said, in a statement that — like many of his writings and remarks — seemed almost to anticipate the events of years to come.

“Bowen was a giant in higher-education scholarship,” wrote Kevin Carey, director of the education-policy program at New America, on Twitter. “His research was urgent, timely, and of the highest quality, for his entire life.”

Mr. McPherson recalled that Mr. Bowen tended to close his emails about joint projects with a favorite line: “We press on.”

“And that just captures who he was,” Mr. McPherson said. “It was never, Look what I’ve done. It was always, Let’s get something done now.”

Beckie Supiano contributed to this report.

Brock Read is assistant managing editor for daily news at The Chronicle. He directs a team of editors and reporters who cover policy, research, labor, and academic trends, among other things. Follow him on Twitter @bhread, or drop him a line at brock.read@chronicle.com.