Walter Albert Jessup was an American educator, president of the State University of Iowa, and president of the Carnegie Corporation and one of its foundations.
Background
Jessup was born on August 12, 1877, in Richmond, Indiana, United States; the only child of Albert Smiley Jessup and Anna (Goodrich) Jessup to survive infancy. His paternal forebears had come from Virginia before the War of 1812 as part of the great Quaker migration from the Carolinas and Virginia that made the Whitewater Valley of Indiana the "Jerusalem of Quakerism for all the Northwest." His grandfather, Levi Jessup, helped manage the Friends Boarding School which became Earlham College in 1859 and which his father attended. His mother, not a Quaker, came of a family that included merchants and politicians.
Jessup's mother died when he was eleven. In 1890 his father married Gulia E. (Hunnicutt) Jones, a teacher and the widow of a Friends minister, who bore him a son and a daughter. Walter had no siblings who survived infancy.
Education
After graduating from high school in 1895, Jessup taught in public schools in Indiana and rose to the rank of principal and superintendent of schools. In 1903 Jessup earned a Bachelor of Arts degree from Earlham College in Richmond, Indiana, United States. In 1908 he became a Master of Arts from Hanover College in Hanover, Indiana, United States. In 1911 Jessup was awarded the Doctor of Philosophy degree at Teachers College, Columbia University in New York City, New York, United States.
Walter collaborated with the University of Minnesota president L. D. Coffman in writing a textbook, Supervision of Arithmetic, and himself wrote Social Factors Affecting Supervision of Special Subjects and The Economy of Time in Arithmetic.
In 1912, following one year as professor and dean of the College of Education at Indiana University, Jessup accepted a similar post at the State University of Iowa. After serving as dean for four years, Jessup was named the 14th president of the university in 1916, a position he held for 18 years. During his tenure, the institution experienced unprecedented growth and innovation, the faculty grew from about 300 to almost 500, the campus grew from 42 to 324 acres, and the student body population more than doubled, from 3,523 to 7,556.
During Jessup’s administration, the university’s reputation as a center of creative and intellectual exploration became firmly set. Although the renowned Iowa Writers’ Workshop was not founded until two years after Jessup’s departure in 1934, its origins may be traced to 1897, when Iowa offered its first course in creative writing, and to 1922, when the university became the first U.S. institution to accept creative work as theses for advanced degrees. Carl Seashore, then dean of the Graduate College, announced the groundbreaking policy with Jessup’s endorsement, and, as a consequence, programs in creative writing and the visual and performing arts flourished.
Construction of the fine arts campus was begun during the early 1930s. Within the College of Liberal Arts, the university’s oldest and largest college, schools in journalism, letters, and the fine arts were established. Other innovations during Jessup’s tenure included the School of Religion, established in 1927 as the first such program at a U.S. public university, and a comprehensive program for the study of child behavior and development, begun in 1917. During the 1920s, with Jessup’s help, the College of Medicine and the University Hospital received substantial support from the Rockefeller Foundation, laying the foundation for what would eventually become the largest public teaching hospital in the United States.
Jessup’s tenure as president was not without controversy. A scandal involving illegal gifts to student-athletes resulted in Iowa’s suspension from the Big Ten athletic conference in 1929. One year later Verne Marshall, editor of the Cedar Rapids Gazette, waged a persistent editorial attack on the Jessup administration, accusing it of financial mismanagement. A subsequent investigation requested by Governor Dan Turner, however, found no conclusive evidence of wrongdoing.
In 1934 Jessup left the university to become president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching in New York. Despite the Great Depression, Jessup was able to secure funds to maintain the foundation’s obligations to its teachers’ pension fund. In 1941 he also became president of the Carnegie Corporation, a position he held until his death in 1944.
Somewhat conservative by nature, Jessup viewed universities as agents of orderly and intelligent change but deplored innovation for its own sake. He was wary of "practical" education and feared graduate schools were becoming ineffective. During World War II he expressed concern that both support and control of scientific research were coming to be centered in Washington, and he deplored the growth of a system in which research and other grants were being made directly to individuals and departments in universities, thus making more difficult the university president's job of "keeping his institution on an even keel."
Personality
An earnest, hardworking, straightforward, forceful, but undramatic man, Jessup was remarkably successful in winning support for the improvement and enlargement of the university he worked at.
Physical Characteristics:
A compact man of average height, Jessup was thick-chested and square-jawed.
Quotes from others about the person
In the words of an Iowa historian, Jessup had a "rare skill in public relations; he could make an acquaintance permanently on first meeting. He had a mental personnel sheet of every state official and of other key people in all parts of the state. "
Interests
Sport & Clubs
Golf, swimming, fishing.
Connections
On June 28, 1898, Jessup married Eleanor Hines. They adopted two children, Richard and Robert (Bob) Albert.
The Biographical Dictionary of Iowa
Iowa has been blessed with citizens of strong character who have made invaluable contributions to the state and to the nation. In the 1930s alone, such towering figures as John L. Lewis, Henry A. Wallace, and Herbert Hoover hugely influenced the nation’s affairs.