Born in Jacksonville, Florida in 1949, Wrighton earned his BS degree with honors in chemistry from Florida State University in 1969. He did his graduate work at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) under Professors Harry B. Gray and George S. Hammond, receiving his PhD in 1972. Based on his research accomplishments as a PhD […]

When Chancellor Danforth was 12 his grandfather instructed him to literally cut the word “impossible” out of his dictionary. The lesson stuck. He graduated from St. Louis Country Day School and spent a brief time at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, before transferring to Princeton and graduating in 1947. He graduated from Harvard Medical School […]

He was a fifth cousin to the poet T.S. Eliot and a distant descendent of Washington University co-founder and third chancellor, William Greenleaf Eliot. He was a graduate of Harvard College and Harvard Law School. A former congressman from Massachusetts and an ardent supporter of President Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal,” Eliot helped draft the Social […]

Serving on the Western Front, he was badly injured, taken prisoner by Germany in 1917, and not repatriated until after the war. When he finally returned home he earned a bachelor’s degree in geology from the University of British Columbia and a master’s degree in science and a PhD in geology, both from Yale. Before […]

Born in 1896, he was a third generation Washingtonian, his grandfather having been a member of the corporation during the William Greenleaf Eliot era and his father an 1882 graduate of the law school. He was educated at Smith Academy in St. Louis and a private school in Pennsylvania before entering Yale and earning his […]

Like his older brothers (Karl and Wilson, who would serve as the presidents of MIT and Washington State College, respectively), he attended Wooster College where his father, a Presbyterian minister, was a professor. After earning his bachelor’s degree he went on to Princeton, where he earned both his master’s and doctoral degrees. He began his […]

He was a distinguished student of the classics and began his academic career at Illinois College in Jacksonville before joining the faculty at Washington University as an instructor in Latin and Greek in 1907. Ten years later he was named Collier Professor of Greek and, after briefly resigning in 1918 to become assistant librarian of […]

He began his professional career as a general practice lawyer in Kansas City before initiating a 30-year career in public life, serving as first assistant city counselor in Kansas City and continuing on to become prosecuting attorney for Jackson County, attorney general of Missouri and, in 1909 at age 36, governor of Missouri. A progressive […]

After a brief stint at the Academy of Olivet College in Michigan, he transferred to Drury College in Springfield, Missouri, where he developed a love for the classics and began a career that led him to become one of the nation’s most distinguished scholars of Greek. A gifted educator and noted orator, upon graduation from […]

After graduating from South Carolina College (now the University of South Carolina) in 1887 with a degree in classics, he accepted a tutorship at the college and taught Greek and Latin while pursuing graduate studies in history and economics. He left the college after one year to become superintendent of the Spartanburg, South Carolina, city […]