George R. Throop

George R. Throop (1882 – 1949) was the Chancellor of Washington University in St. Louis from 1927 until 1944.

Throop /ˈtruːp/ was born in Boydsville, Tennessee, in 1882. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees from DePauw University in Indiana and his doctorate from Cornell University. He was a distinguished student of the classics and began his academic career at Illinois College in Jacksonville before joining the faculty at Washington University in St. Louis as an instructor in Latin and Greek in 1907. Ten years later, he was named Collier Professor of Greek and, after briefly resigning in 1918 to become assistant librarian of the St. Louis Public Library, he returned as assistant to the chancellor in 1921, serving both Chancellors Frederic Hall and Herbert Hadley.

Throop served a year as interim chancellor before being named chancellor in 1928. Under his leadership, Givens Hall for the School of Architecture was built, the University's Extension Division became University College, and an affiliation with the Central Institute for the Deaf was begun. The medical school opened the Oscar Johnson Institute, the McMillan Hospital Clinics, and the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology.

Throop, although not without his critics on both campuses and admittedly not as gifted an administrator as some of his predecessors, nevertheless guided the University through tough financial times and declining enrollment spurred by the Great Depression and the looming Second World War, adopting pay cuts and establishing an Alumni Endowment Drive, a massive recruitment drive, and an endowment drive funded by local businesses. Still, the pressures of the times made these efforts less successful than they might have otherwise been. The tireless Throop once described his dedication and work ethic by saying, "The first element of success is work, the second is work, and the third is work."

He resigned the chancellorship in 1944 and died five years later.


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