
Edwin A. Alderman
'Edwin Anderson Alderman' (born
May 15,
1861 in
Wilmington, North Carolina; died
April 30,
1931 in
Connellsville, Pennsylvania) served as the
President of three universities.
Edwin A. Alderman Elementary School is named after him.
Alderman graduated from the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1882. He became a schoolteacher in
Goldsboro, North Carolina, and then superintendent of the school district there.
In 1891, Alderman and
Charles Duncan McIver successfully pressed the North Carolina Legislature to establish the Normal and Industrial School for Women, now known as the
University of North Carolina at Greensboro. Alderman taught there until 1893, when he became a professor at North Carolina-Chapel Hill; he was named President of that institution in
1896. He moved on to take the same position at
Tulane University in
1900, before moving again to the
University of Virginia in
1904. There he stayed for 27 years, until his death in
1931 from a stroke in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, while en route to deliver a speech in Illinois.
He spent two-thirds of his long term at the University of Virginia physically disabled after a bad bout with
tuberculosis.
[1]
Alderman was a noted public speaker, and won fame for his memorial address for
Woodrow Wilson, delivered to a joint session of Congress on December 15, 1924.
Academic Career
★ 1896-1900 – President of the
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (
Chapel Hill, North Carolina)
★ 1900-1904 – President of
Tulane University (
New Orleans, Louisiana)
★ 1904-1931 – President of the
University of Virginia (
Charlottesville, Virginia)
References
1. ''Hail to the Chiefs'' http://www.virginia.edu/insideuva/2005/08/chiefs.html. URL retrieved June 23, 2006.
Sources
★
American National Biography, vol. 1, pp. 242-243.
★
Dumas Malone, ''Edwin A. Alderman: A Biography'' (1940).