Background

Charles Woolsey Cole was born on February 8, 1906 in Montclair, New Jersey, United States. He was the son of Charles Buckingham Cole and Bertha Woolsey Dwight.

Education

A summa cum laude graduate of Amherst College (1927), he earned an M. A. (1928) at Columbia University. Cole began his teaching career in 1929 as an instructor in history at Columbia, where he earned his Ph. D. in 1931. Cole had honorary degrees from a dozen schools, including Amherst, Columbia, Wesleyan, Williams, Hamilton, Trinity, and Doshisha University in Japan.

Career

Returning to Amherst in 1935 as an associate professor, he was appointed George C. Olds Professor of Economics in 1937. Three years later, he was named professor of history at Columbia. During World War II he was a New York region executive in the Office of Price Administration (1942 - 1943), where, as Time put it, he pinned "ceiling price tags on laundry tickets and the work of stevedores. " In the 1943-1944 academic year he taught at both the United States Navy School of Military Government and Administration and the United States Army School of Military Government. In 1946, shortly after Amherst celebrated its 125th anniversary, Cole became its twelfth president. Only thirty-nine years old, he had established a national reputation for his scholarship and had recently chaired an alumni committee to consult with the Amherst faculty on the college's postwar plans. Like other college administrators of the period, he was confronted with a student population made substantially different by returning veterans under the G. I. Bill of Rights and by a national desire to make higher education available to all who could benefit from it. In 1948, Cole ushered in the "new curriculum, " which was to last until 1966 and was widely influential among other small liberal arts colleges in the Northeast and the Midwest. Requiring a common core of science and humanities courses for all freshmen and sophomores, the new curriculum was designed to cross the traditional lines that had long separated the academic disciplines from one another. Freshman physics lectures, for example, were intended to give students not only an introduction to the physical sciences but were also to provide an awareness of how the scientific mind works. Thus, physics lecturers often posed ethical questions that were being simultaneously considered in philosophy and writing classes. Physics problems were keyed to lessons being taught in mathematics sections as well. Every effort was made to provide a similar approach to learning in all areas of the curriculum. The emphasis in each discipline was on the process of knowing, on the uniqueness of knowledge in a given area, and on the interdependency of intellectual inquiry. The new curriculum was designed to give all students a common base for discussion outside the classroom and to produce a collegiality of learning that Cole and the faculty believed was absent, or at least more difficult to sustain, in the free elective program that historically had served at Amherst and other schools. Under Cole's direction, the college's fraternities were forced to renounce the policies of their national organizations that barred blacks, Jews, and specific ethnic groups from membership. Any fraternity chapter at Amherst failing to remove such discriminatory clauses from its national charter had to disaffiliate from its national organization or be closed down. The policy changes bore Cole's imprint and reflected the broad range of his own interests. A liberal, he prized democratic values and sought to break down ethnic and racial barriers that had earlier limited admissions to the nation's select colleges. Before his presidency ended with his resignation in 1960, Cole increased the then all-male college's enrollment from 1, 000 to 1, 200 students, built up its endowment from $16 million to $42 million, and attracted a number of leading scholars to the faculty. He was known for his easy accessibility to students, aided, one of his relatives said, by his "boyish, blue-eyed appearance, which often caused him to be mistaken for a student himself. " He was a passionate and skilled fly-fisherman, working trout streams and rivers from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. His other nonacademic interest was gardening. He resigned his post in 1964. He served as a director of the Federal Reserve Bank in Boston from 1966 to 1968. Cole's area of academic expertise was seventeenth-century France and mercantilism. His major scholarly work was Colbert and a Century of French Mercantilism, a two-volume study that appeared first in 1939 and was revised and reprinted in 1964. His other books include French Mercantilist Doctrines Before Colbert (1931; rev. ed. 1969) and French Mercantilism, 1683-1700 (1943; rev. ed. 1965). Cole was coauthor of several textbooks: History of Europe Since 1500 (1949; rev. ed. 1956) and History of Western Civilization (1962), both with Carlton J. H. Hayes and Marshall Baldwin; Economic History of Europe (1941), with Shephard B. Clough; a two-volume history, A Free People (1970), with H. P. Bragdon and S. P. McCutcheon; and A History of a Free People (1973), with H. P. Bragdon. Cole also served as an editor of Macmillan's Career Books series. Cole died on board a cruise ship off Los Angeles while returning to his home in Seattle.

Achievements

• As the youngest president in Amherst's history, Cole introduced a series of broad reforms in the school's academic and social policies that reached far beyond its Massachusetts campus. On his retirement from Amherst in 1960, Cole became a vice-president of the Rockefeller Foundation. In the fall of 1961, President John F. Kennedy appointed him ambassador to Chile, where he opened the new embassy building in Santiago. He received the grand cross of the Order of Merit from the government of Chile and was honored by the government of Honduras as a grand officer of the Order of Morazan. He was a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Council on Foreign Relations.

Works

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  • Economic History of Europe
  • History of Europe Since 1500
  • French Mercantilist Doctrines Before Colbert

Views

Quotations: "It is important for the students to receive a common body of knowledge, " Cole told the New York Times, adding that "we need a basic education for a democratic people. "

Membership

American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Council on Foreign Relations

Connections

On August 28, 1927 he married Katharine Bush Salmon; they had two children. The first Mrs. Cole died on February 20, 1972. Cole married Marie Greer Donahoe on May 15, 1974.

Father:

Charles Buckingham Cole

Mother:

Bertha Woolsey Dwight

Spouse:

Katharine Bush Salmon

Spouse:

Marie Greer Donahoe