March 28, 1869 - February 12, 1946
Personal Data
Born: March 28, 1869 Doune, Perthshire, Scotland
Died: February 12, 1946 Northampton, MA
Citizenship: emigrated to Canada in 1891 and then to the United States in 1895, became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1905
Married: Elisabeth Muser in Offenburg, Germany, June 25, 1906
Children: two daughters, Margaret and Caroline, and a son, Allan, who died of rheumatic fever at the age of 17
Education
1891 - M.A. in Philosophy University of Edinburgh, Scotland
1898 - Ph.D. in English Harvard University
Employment
1942 Board of Overseers, Harvard University
1941 Presided over the International Student Service Summer Student Leadership Institute at Campobello, New Brunswick, Canada
1940-1945 Chair, Executive Committee, Commission to Study the Organization of Peace
1940-1941 Board of Directors, National Refugee Service
1930-1946 Board of Directors, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
1926-1946 Advisory Council, the Open Road, Inc.
1924-1945 Editorial Board, G.C. Merriam and Company
1917-1939 President of Smith College
1914-1915 Exchange Professor, University of Paris
1906-1917 Professor of English, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
1904-1906 Professor of English, Columbia University, New York, NY
1901-1904 Instructor of English, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA
1898-1901 Associate Professor of English Literature, Bryn Mawr College
1891-1895 Resident English Master, Upper Canada College, Toronto, Canada
Awards and Honors
William Allan Neilson Library at Smith College named after Neilson, the College's third president, 1946
French Legion of Honor, 1935
Membership-Professional Organization
1937-1938 President, American Association for Adult Education (AAAE)
1924 President, Modern Language Association
1920-1946 Trustee, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Education. Served intermittently on the College Entrance
Examination Board
Publications
1945 (with Cowley, W. H., Fuess, C., Stoddard, G., Hand, A., & Kuhn, T. S.) A précis of general education in a free society/with commentaries by William Allen Neilson . . . [et al.]. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Student Council.
1944 - Neilson, W. A. (Ed.). Proceedings of the international student assembly: Held at the American University. Washington, DC, 2-5 September 1942. London, England: Oxford University Press.
1943 - Library and public opinion. ALA Bulletin, 37, 153.
1943 - Future of the humanities. Harper's Magazine (10457143), 186, 388-391.
1943 - Webster's biographical dictionary. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam.
1942 - Challenge to our colleges. New York Times Magazine, p. 12.
1942 - Neilson, W. A., Knott, T. A., & Carhart, P. W. (Eds.). Webster's new international dictionary of the English language. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam.
1941 - The past instructs. The American Scholar, 1(3). doi:10.2307/41204581
1941 - Neilson, W. A. (Ed.). We escaped : Twelve personal narratives of the flight to America. New York, NY: Macmillan.
1941 - America's dilemma. Northampton, England: The Hampshire Bookshop.
1940 - Neilson, W. A. (Ed.). Webster's new international dictionary of the English language. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam.
1940 - (with Agar, H., Aydelotte, F., Borgese, G.). The city of man: A declaration on world democracy, Issued by Herbert Agar, Frank Aydelotte, G. A. Borgese (and others). New York, NY: Viking Press.
1940 - Intellectual honesty, and other addresses, being mainly chapel talks at Smith College. Litchfield, CT: Prospect Press.
1939 - Editorial. The American Scholar, 1(3). doi:10.2307/41206746
1939 - Education can't be better than the teachers. Survey Graphic, 28, 610-613.
1939 - Minorities in our midst. Survey Graphic, 28, 98-103.
1938 - Process of reading. Journal of Adult Education, 10, 229-234.
1937 - (with Hutchins, R.) What is the job of our colleges? Progressive Education, 14, 311-313.
1937 - A mine for the historian and philogist. The Journal of Higher Education, (4), 229. doi:10.2307/1974882
1937 - Neilson, W. A. (Ed.). Webster's new international dictionary of the English language. Springfield, MA: G. & C. Merriam.
1937 - Neilson, W. A. (Ed.). Roads to knowledge. New York, NY: W.W. Norton.
1936 - The American scholar today. The American Scholar, (2), 149. doi:10.2307/41204198
1932 - Are American colleges wasteful? Scribner's Magazine, 91, 326-329.
1932 - Roads to knowledge. New York, NY: W. W. Norton.
1931 - Town and gown today. Journal of Adult Education, 3, 133-137.
1930 - Resignation from Smith College of Dr Harry Elmer Barnes. School & Society, 31, 591.
1930 - Junior year in France. Progressive Education, 776-78.
1930 - Is official censorship of books desirable? Congressional Digest, 9(2), 56-57.
1930 - The theory of censorship. Atlantic Monthly, 145, 13-16.
1929 - Shall we join the ladies? School & Society, 29, 469-474.
1929 - Should women be educated like men? Forum 81, 102-105.
1929 - (with Munro, W. B.) Women's colleges reply. Atlantic Monthly, 143, 111-115.
1926 - Charles W. Eliot : The man and his beliefs. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.
1926 - President Eliot. Saturday Review of Literature, 3187-189.
1925 - Do women learn faster? Colliers, 7625.
1925 - Overcrowding in women's colleges. Nation, 120(3123), 539.
1924 - President Eliot at ninety. Nation, 118, 313.
1924 - From the point of view of a professor turned president. PMLA: Publications Of The Modern Language Association Of America, 39(Supplement), xlii-liii.
1917 - Curse of memory. English Journal, 680-87.
1913 - Neilson, W. A. (Ed.). Lectures on Dr. Eliot's five-foot shelf of books. New York, NY: P.F. Collier.
Professional Interest Areas
Scholar of William Shakespeare, Robert Burns, and Elizabethan theater
Lexicography
Promotion of civil rights as demonstrated by his term on the Board of Directors of the NAACP from 1930 to 1946.
Advocate for European refugees, especially but not exclusively scholars from the dictatorships of Germany, Russia and Italy in the years after the First World War until his death in 1946.
Advocate for the improvement of women's education
Major Contributions to Adult Education
As president of Smith College, one of the largest women's colleges of the day, he made strategic educational changes to improve the delivery of higher education to women:
- increased the number of faculty while maintaining a student population of 2000
- oversaw the purchase and building of new residence halls so all students could live on campus
- added interdepartmental majors in science, landscape architecture, and theatre, which were formally regarded as men's majors
- added a coeducational graduate program, The School for Social Work
- initiated a junior year study abroad program in 1924
Additional Resources
Articles
From the San Francisco Public Schools Bulletin, Aug. 1937-June 1938, Vol. 9, p. 159. Neilson spoke at a convention of the American Association for Adult Education and warned of the negative impact of jargon within the medical profession, and the new sciences of sociology and pedagogy who are following suit.
Photo Gallery
Video/Audio
Presentations
Books
Thorp, M. F. (1956). Neilson of Smith. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
Interesting Facts
His third area of interest was promoting civil rights as demonstrated by his term on the Board of Directors of the NAACP from 1930 to
1946.
References
Neilson, William Allan. (1996). World Authors 1900-1950,
President William Allan Neilson. (2014). In Smithipedia. Retrieved from http://sophia.smith.edu/blog/smithipedia/administration/president-william-allan-neilson/
Rose, P. I. (n.d.). William Allan Neilson: "A king o'men [and women, too!], for a' that". Retrieved from http://www.smith.edu/libraries/sites/default/files/proselecture.pdf
San Francisco public schools bulletin (Aug. 1937-June 1938). (2014). In Movaco. Retrieved from http://www.mocavo.com/San-Francisco-Public-Schools-Bulletin-Aug-1937-June-1938-Volume-9/594751/159
Smith history: Smith College presidents. (n.d.) In Smith College. Retrieved from http://www.smith.edu/about-smith/smith-tradition/presidents
William Allan Neilson. (2014, June 25). In Wikipedia: The Free Encyclopedia. Retrieved from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Allan_Neilson
William Allan Neilson personal papers, 1852-1946. (2005, October 27). In Five College Archives & Manuscript Collections. Retrieved from http://asteria.fivecolleges.edu/findaids/smitharchives/manosca120.html
Comments (1)
Cynthia Edwards said
at 12:19 pm on Jul 9, 2014
William A. Neilson is a new addition to the adult education contributors, so all information here has been added by me.
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