Andrew Fleming West

• 1. Introduction

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  Andrew Fleming West spent much of his life fighting for something Princeton did not yet have: a residential home for its graduate students. The breakthrough came only after a stranger to the university, Isaac C. Wyman, died in 1910 and left $800,000 behind for exactly that purpose. West had already clashed for years with Woodrow Wilson, then President of Princeton from 1902 to 1910, over where such a college should even stand. What carried an unlikely Latin teacher into that fight? What did his marriage cost him, and what did Princeton keep of his name?

• 2. Building the Graduate College

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  In December 1900, Princeton named West the first dean of its newly founded Graduate School. In that role, he pushed to create the Princeton University Graduate College, a residential home built specifically for graduate students. A number of setbacks slowed the project for years before it finally came together. The college was dedicated on the 22nd of October 1913, and West remained dean of the Graduate School until 1928. That same year, 1913, he published his own account of the fight, titled The Graduate College of Princeton.

• 3. From Cincinnati to Princeton

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  West studied at Princeton from 1870 to 1874, and in his final year there he founded the Princeton Glee Club. After graduating, he taught Latin at a high school in Cincinnati for six years, then travelled to Europe for further academic study. He next served as principal of the Morris Academy in Morristown, New Jersey, before Princeton brought him back in 1883 as professor of Latin. He went on to hold the Giger Professorship of Latin there for forty-five years. Decades later, that same reputation as a Latin scholar made West the founding president of the American Classical League.

• 4. Marriage and Loss

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  In 1889, West married Lucy Fitz Randolph, daughter of New Jersey Governor Theodore Fitz Randolph. That same year, Lucy gave birth to their only child, a son named Randolph. Soon afterward, she suffered a mental breakdown and was hospitalized, remaining there until her death in 1929. Even so, Princeton commissioned a bronze statue of West in 1928. Sculptor R. Tait McKenzie placed it in the Graduate College grounds, the very institution his career had fought to create.

• 5. What Princeton Kept

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  In 1902, the American Philological Association elected West as its president. That October, the University of Oxford awarded him an honorary Doctor of Letters, timed to the university's tercentenary celebration of the Bodleian Library. Contemporaries regarded him as the era's foremost champion of classical studies. Princeton later named an academic chair after him, the Andrew Fleming West Chair in Classics. Westland Mansion, the home of his friend Grover Cleveland, also carries his name. West's own writing traced the same interests. In 1892, Charles Scribner's Sons published his book Alcuin and the Rise of the Christian Schools. Ten years later, D. Appleton and Company published his A Latin Grammar for Schools. His final listed book appeared in 1929. Titled A Narrative of the Graduate College of Princeton University, it covered the story from its proposal in 1896 to its dedication in 1913. West was born on the 17th of May 1853, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania. He died on the 27th of December 1943, a long way in time from the Princeton grounds that still carry his name.