Dorie Friend, College’s 11th President, Dies at 89

Dorie Friend in 1982. Photo courtesy of Swarthmore College

Theodore “Dorie” Friend, who served as Swarthmore College’s 11th president from 1973 to 1982, died of cancer at his home in Villanova on November 4. He was 89.

An award-winning historian who pursued his scholarly interests with passion and conviction, Friend came to Swarthmore with the goal of rebuilding trust and a sense of community on campus after the challenges of the late 1960s and early 1970s. 

A native of Pittsburgh and a lifelong Pirates fan, Friend attended St. Paul’s School in Concord, New Hampshire. In 1953, he earned a B.A. from Williams College, where he won a contest to name Ephelia, the school’s ubiquitous purple cow mascot. He later received a doctorate from Yale University and pursued studies as a Fulbright Scholar in the Philippines, where his work formed the basis for his first book, “Between Two Empires: The Ordeal of the Philippines, 1929–1946” (1965). The book won the prestigious Bancroft Prize in American History, Foreign Policy, and Diplomacy.

In 1959, Friend joined the history faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught for 14 years before being selected as Swarthmore’s 11th president. Friend faced a number of challenges at Swarthmore. Within a year of his taking office, the value of the college’s endowment dropped more than 50%. The country was also in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis, and confidence in the nation’s leadership was at a low ebb. Six weeks after he began work in his Parrish Hall office on campus, Friend found that it had been trashed by students who were protesting America’s engagement in the Vietnam War — a war that he had long publicly opposed.

In the mid-1970s, Swarthmore faced a class-action gender-discrimination lawsuit alleging unfair treatment of female faculty members. Although the suit was ultimately decided in the college’s favor, it exposed some practices that raised concerns. In response to those concerns, Friend established a new part-time position of “equal opportunity officer.” The college also adopted a written nondiscrimination employment policy.

Friend threw himself into the work of connecting with students and the campus community. Indeed, sometimes he did this quite literally: During his first year at Swarthmore, he joined members of the men’s soccer team in a pickup game against the men’s football team — and got run over by one of the football players. The collision severed his ACL. And, at the college’s 1976 Oktoberfest celebration, he joined a tug-of-war game that spanned the Crum Creek — students on one side, versus two faculty members, the provost, the registrar, and Friend on the other. In the end, the more senior team was dragged, amid cheers and catcalls, into the creek.

Friend held open office hours for students and took an active interest in student concerns. Late in his tenure, he co-taught a class on Southeast Asia.

The Friends regularly hosted salons in their home for members of the community, to connect people they thought would enjoy talking with one another. Elizabeth Friend kept records of the seating arrangements and menus so that, when guests returned, they would sit next to someone new and never be served the same meal twice.

Friend was a devoted squash player. For a single week in 1965, he was the top-ranked player in Buffalo. At Swarthmore, he often joined members of the men’s team on the college’s chilly courts. When a women’s team was established in 1976, he offered his help — ultimately coaching each of the club’s nine members, most of whom had never played before, by playing with them twice a week. The following season, the team sent four players to a national women’s intercollegiate tournament. In 2007, Friend was a finalist in the U.S. Open Championship’s 75+ division.

From 1984 to 1996, following his tenure at Swarthmore College, Friend served as president of the Philadelphia-based Eisenhower Exchange Fellowships Foundation. He built the organization’s endowment and brought to the U.S. the first fellows from China, El Salvador, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. In 1986, he published a novel, “Family Laundry,” in which, according to a review in the New York Times, he “conducted a difficult inquiry” into an upper-middle-class Anglo-Saxon family and its intentions and failures. He went on to publish four more works of history and analysis. He also served for many years as a senior fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute. 

Friend is survived by sons Tad and Pier, daughter Timmie Friend Haskins, five grandchildren, and his companion Mary French. He is predeceased by Elizabeth Pierson Friend, his wife of 43 years, who died in 2003. 

Published in cooperation with Swarthmore College.