Kenneth Charles Morton Sills (December 5, 1879 – November 15, 1954) was the eighth president of Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College

Bowdoin College , founded in 1794, is an elite private liberal arts college located in the coastal Maine town of Brunswick, Maine. As of 2011, U.S. News and World Report ranks Bowdoin 6th among liberal arts colleges in the United States. At times, it was ranked as high as 4th in the country. It is...

 and the third to be an alumnus.

Life and career

Originally from in Halifax, Nova Scotia

City of Halifax

Halifax is a city in Canada, which was the capital of the province of Nova Scotia and shire town of Halifax County. It was the largest city in Atlantic Canada until it was amalgamated into Halifax Regional Municipality in 1996...

, in 1901 Sills graduated Summa Cum Laude from Bowdoin where he was appointed to Phi Beta Kappa and Delta Kappa Epsilon

Delta Kappa Epsilon

Delta Kappa Epsilon is a fraternity founded at Yale College in 1844 by 15 men of the sophomore class who had not been invited to join the two existing societies...

. He pursued graduate degrees at Columbia University

Columbia University

Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...

 and Harvard University

Harvard University

Harvard University is a private Ivy League university located in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States, established in 1636 by the Massachusetts legislature. Harvard is the oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the first corporation chartered in the country...

 afterwards.

After working at Columbia for a brief period of time, Sills returned to teach at Bowdoin in 1906 where he soon became dean. After a failed run for the United States Senate

United States Senate

The United States Senate is the upper house of the bicameral legislature of the United States, and together with the United States House of Representatives comprises the United States Congress. The composition and powers of the Senate are established in Article One of the U.S. Constitution. Each...

 as a democrat in 1916, Sills became president of Bowdoin in 1918. He kept determined to keep the school close to its liberal arts curriculum and closed down its Medical School of Maine in 1920. In the early 1930s, Sills was recruited by President Franklin Delano Roosevelt to commission a study on how the Bay of Fundy

Bay of Fundy

The Bay of Fundy is a bay on the Atlantic coast of North America, on the northeast end of the Gulf of Maine between the Canadian provinces of New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, with a small portion touching the U.S. state of Maine...

 tides could harness electrical power and, from 1939 to 1941, he served as chairman of the board for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching. After World War II, he served on the board of trustees of the World Peace Foundation. Sills served an unusually long term as president, finally resigning in 1952, widely regarded as one of the most prominent and amiable college presidents in Bowdoin's over 200 year history. Nevertheless, a published poet, he is perhaps best known today for having written the school's Alma Mater, "Rise, Sons of Bowdoin" which continues to be sung today more than fifty years after it was originally written.

External links

• http://library.bowdoin.edu/arch/mss/kcmsg.shtml
• http://www.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-4866(196503)38%3A1%3C113%3ASOBTLO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T