Frederick Jackson, former president of Clark University, died on March 20, 2015. He earned his bachelor’s degree in English literature from Brown University in 1941 before serving in the air force during World War II. He earned his master’s (1948) and doctoral (1950) degrees in American civilization from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to his arrival at Clark, Fred was first appointed assistant executive vice president and then vice president for humanities and social sciences at New York University. He had also previously taught at Marietta College and the University of Illinois and worked as a grants officer for the Carnegie Corporation of New York. During his time at Clark, of which he was president from 1967 to 1970, Fred took a leadership role in the establishment of the Worcester Consortium for Higher Education, which fostered a collaborative partnership among Worcester’s colleges and universities, and opened up opportunities for students to take courses at any of the city’s institutions of higher learning. After his tenure at Clark, he enjoyed a distinguished career as director of the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), the consortium of eleven major midwestern universities composed of the Big Ten and the University of Chicago, where he worked until his retirement in 1984, when he returned to central Massachusetts. Among the CIC’s many initiatives was a major effort to increase the number of minority students entering engineering schools and the number of doctoral fellowship programs for minorities in the social sciences, humanities, and science and engineering.
Westborough, MA
United States