F. Champion Ward Papers

F. (Frederick) Champion Ward, son of Clarence and Helen Eshbaugh Ward, was born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1910 during the time that his father was working on his PhD at Princeton University. The Wards moved to Oberlin after Clarence accepted a teaching position as the Adelia A. Field Johnston Professor of the History and Appreciation of Art at Oberlin College. F. Champion Ward received his BA and MA degrees from Oberlin, and a PhD in philosophy from Yale in 1937. He was a Sterling Fellow at Yale in 1937-38.

From 1937 to 1945 he taught philosophy and psychology at Denison University, and as associate dean he trained officers for the Army’s de-Nazification efforts in Europe. Ward was associated with the University of Chicago from 1945 to 1958. He was appointed associate dean of the university in 1946 and then served as dean from 1947 to 1954. In 1955, he was named William Rainer Harper Professor of Humanities.

F. Champion Ward served the Ford Foundation as educational consultant in India from February 1954 through August 1956, while on leave from the University of Chicago, and again from June 1957 until October 1958. While serving as educational consultant to the Government of India, Ward also advised the governments of Turkey and Jordan on the training of teachers and, in 1957, was one of two American members of an International Commission on Education in Burma. In 1958, Ward resigned from the University of Chicago to accept the directorship of the Ford Foundation’s Overseas Development program for the Middle East and Africa, a position he held until March 1963, when he was appointed Deputy Vice President for International Programs. In October 1966, he was appointed Vice President for Education and Research, and in January 1971 became Senior Advisor in Education to the International Division of the Foundation.

In 1968, Ward was Chairman of the White House Task Force on Education of Gifted Persons. While serving as Senior Advisor in Education, Ward helped to organize the Bellagio meetings of heads of agencies on the subject of education and development, and served as a member of UNESCO’s International Commission on the Development of Education (the “Future Commission”), which submitted a report, Learning to Be, in 1972.

Following his retirement from the Ford Foundation in 1976, Ward served as Chancellor of the New School for Social Research in New York, as a member of the Board of Education and Representative Town Meeting of Greenwich, Connecticut, and as a consultant to various foundations and agencies of government.

F. Champion Ward was a member of the Board of Editors of the Journal of General Education, Editor of The Idea and Practice of General Education and Education and Development Reconsidered, and a contributor to Humanistic Education and Western Civilization and The Knowledge Most Worth Having.

From 1959 to 1978 Ward also served as a trustee of Oberlin College, where he was the recipient of an honorary degree. His wife, Duira Baldinger Ward, was a member of Oberlin’s class of 1934, and all three of their children, Geoffrey, Andrew, and Helen, were graduates of Oberlin. Geoffrey C. Ward, class of 1962, is Emeritus Professor of History at Oberlin.

F. Champion Ward died at his home in North Branford, Connecticut on July 2, 2007.

R. Duira “Dewy” Baldinger Ward was born in 1913 and raised in Butler, Pennsylvania. She and F. Champion Ward were married after they earned their degrees at Oberlin in 1934. The Wards moved to a permanent home in Greenwich, Connecticut in 1959, and she became a champion of the disenfranchised. She was an active and lifelong Democrat; served on the Board of the NAACP of Greenwich; lobbied on behalf of health aides and domestic workers; and served on the board of the Fair Housing Coalition. In 1967 she was a delegate to the “Pacem in Terris” conference in Geneva, Switzerland. In 1969 she began a decade-long tenure on the Greenwich Board of Social Services, and later became the founding President of the reconstituted National Conference on Social Welfare. In 1980 she chaired Connecticut’s Income Maintenance delegation to the White House Conference on Children. She became President of the Connecticut Association for Human Services, which presented her with its Director’s Award in 1989, one of many awards she received for her activism.

Elected the first female President of the Oberlin College Alumni Association in 1970, Duira Ward not only revitalized the Association with her innovations but also championed the rights of Oberlin students during a period of turmoil. In 1996 she received Oberlin’s Alumni Medal, and in 2010 the Alumni Association named their new center in her honor. She died on February 23, 2015, in Branford, Connecticut, at the age of 101.

Sources Consulted

Biographical sketch by F. Champion Ward, undated (Archives case file).

“Dr. F. Champion Ward ’32, Lifelong Educator” (written by the Ward family), Oberlin Alumni Magazine, Vol. 103, No. 2 (Fall/Winter 2007), accessed online at http://www.oberlin.edu/alummag/fallwinter2007-08/losses.html.

Duira B. Ward Obituary, Greenwich Time, March 18, 2015, accessed online at Legacy.com: http://www.legacy.com/obituaries/greenwichtime/obituary.aspx?pid=174417165.

Note written by Anne Cuyler Salsich.