#princetonfaculty

Throwback Thursday: Masakazu Konishi was a professor of biology at Princeton University in the 1960s and 1970s. While at Princeton, he said, someone gave him three baby owls. Two survived to adulthood and he began raising owls. Konishi studied the auditory sense owls used to catch their prey, even in the dark. He theorized that sensing the difference in the time it took for sound waves to reach the right or left ear, as well as sensing the difference in the intensity heard in each ear, was what would help owls--and humans--determine the location of whatever caused the sound. He's shown here with one of his owls ca. 1971.

On October 15, 1915, the Daily Princetonian reported on a poll of Princeton faculty in advance of a vote on women's suffrage in New Jersey. Although philosophy and psychology faculty were unanimously in support of women having the right to vote, this was not necessarily a view shared across departments. One psychology professor explained, “the feminine type is in some respects more suited for political responsibility than the masculine type and in other respects less adapted; the two types supplement each other.” Faculty opponents to women’s suffrage expressed concern that it would be equivalent to supporting pacifism. A majority of faculty, however, said they would vote for the enfranchisement of women in New Jersey.

Princeton hired Joshua Hall McIlvaine, Class of 1837, to teach what was then called Political Economy in 1860. In 1869, the Board of Trustees decided to give the responsibility for teaching Political Economy to an administrator, Lyman Atwater, and assigned McIlvaine to teach Belles Lettres (English literature) over McIlvaine's protest. In 1870, McIlvaine left Princeton for a position pastoring High Street Presbyterian Church in Newark, where he served until 1887, when he founded the new Evelyn College in Princeton, New Jersey, the state's first women's college. He was its president until he died in 1897. Following his death, Evelyn closed permanently.

George Macloskie joined Princeton's faculty in 1874, teaching natural history until his retirement in 1906. He was trained as a theologian, not a scientist, but nonetheless kept up with scientific research. In his writings and teaching, he emphasized the harmony between science and religion. The Princeton Press wrote of the new professor in 1875, "His opening lecture has left a happy impression of his public endeavors, and we are happy to add that in ordinary social life he is pleasing. Students we believe will find in him a friend and a helper."

George Robert Loehr, the son of missionaries, was born in China. After earning his Ph.D. in Rome, Loehr returned to China to teach at Yengching University. From March 1943 to October 1945, he was held in a Japanese internment camp in Shantung Province in China. On August 17, 1945, internees had their first contact with the outside world when American troops parachuted in. The process of liberating the camp took about two months.

Loehr later joined the Princeton University faculty as Professor of Modern Languages. He spoke English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and two Chinese dialects.