Alfred Whitney Griswold

The decision to create the eleventh and twelfth residential colleges at Yale, known as Morse College and Ezra Stiles College, was made by Griswold. In 1952, he established Master of Arts programs in teaching, affiliated with the traditional liberal arts departments. During World War II he headed special U.S. Army training programs in languages and civil affairs.

In 1950, Griswold became president of Yale University, serving until his death in 1963. Griswold was unaware of his imminent rise to the presidency. The day of his elevation, he told his wife, “Thank God we’re not in that racket”, after they had lunched with a friend, the president of Mount Holyoke College. As president, Griswold is credited with tripling the university endowment to $375 million, building 26 new buildings and establishing research fellowships for young scholars, particularly in the sciences. He was arguably Yale’s first modern president, and was widely quoted in the national media for his views on foreign affairs, amateur athletics, academic freedom, and in defense of the liberal arts against government intrusion. Griswold also worked in successful collaboration with Nathan Pusey, his counterpart at Harvard, to maintain amateurism in athletics among universities known now as the Ivy League.

He taught English for a year, then changed to history, which he taught at Yale from 1933, becoming an assistant professor in 1938, an associate professor in 1942, and a full professor in 1947. Griswold received a Ph.D. in the new field of history, the arts and letters, writing the first dissertation in American studies in 1933. The American cult of success was the dissertation’s subject, informed in part by Griswold’s brief time on Wall Street between his graduation and the stock market crash of 1929. Griswold authored The Far Eastern Policy of the United States (1938), Farming and Democracy (1948), Essays on Education (1954), In the University Tradition (1957), and Liberal Education and the Democratic Ideal (1959). Although Griswold He previously had shown little interest in world affairs, but in 1935 he joined the Yale Institute of International Studies and turned his attention to the history of foreign policy, working with Samuel Flagg Bemis. Bemis however was a specialist on Latin America, so for insight on the Far East Griswold relied heavily on books by Tyler Dennett. His 1938 book on Far Eastern policy was an elegantly written and vigorous survey which for many years was the most influential work in the field. He had changed from being an ardent internationalist in his undergraduate years to becoming a non-interventionist in the late 1930s—he avoided calling himself an isolationist because of its negative connotations. He was an ardent liberal New Dealer, and feared that involvement in world affairs would lead to war and war would undermine American liberalism. He wanted American foreign-policy to focus on the Western Hemisphere, and ignore the hurricanes roaring in Europe and Asia. By 1938 he had broken with Roosevelt because of the presidents increasing involvement in European and Asian affairs. He said that Washington should abandon its policy befriending China and instead establish friendlier relationships with Japan. He was deeply suspicious of Britain, which he believed was trying to trick or maneuver Roosevelt into pulling the United States into a world war. He opposed Lend Lease aid to Britain when it was facing Hitler alone. Finally in summer 1941 he decided Hitler was America’s greatest enemy and his alliance with Japan made any agreement with Tokyo impossible.

Griswold married Mary Brooks (1906–1997) on June 10, 1930 in Scranton, Pennsylvania. His former home, at 237 East Rock Road in New Haven, is a contributing property in the Prospect Hill Historic District.

Griswold was born in Morristown, New Jersey, the son of Elsie Montgomery (Whitney) and Harold Ely Griswold. He graduated from Hotchkiss School in 1925, before obtaining his B.A. from Yale University in 1929, where he edited campus humor magazine The Yale Record.

Alfred Whitney Griswold (October 27, 1906 – April 19, 1963) was an American historian and educator. He served as 16th president of Yale University from 1951 to 1963, during which he built much of Yale’s modern scientific research infrastructure, especially on Science Hill.