Paul L. Ward: Obituary, 94, historian and college president, dies

Paul Langdon Ward, a historian and former head of the American Historical Association who was president of Sarah Lawrence College in the 1960's, died last Sunday at his retirement home in Gwynedd, Pa. He was 94.

Dr. Ward became the fifth president of Sarah Lawrence College in 1960. He was also a member of Gov. Nelson A. Rockefeller's Commission on the Higher Education of Women. He left the college in 1965 when he was named executive director of the association of professional historians, a post he held until his retirement in 1974.

He graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Amherst College in 1933 and received his master's degree and a Ph.D. in history from Harvard in 1934 and 1940. He specialized in medieval European history and Elizabethan England.

He started his academic career as an instructor at Harvard and was an assistant professor at Bard College before serving as a researcher for the Office of Strategic Services in Washington in World War II.

He was a missionary in China after the war, taught at Colby College and, in 1953, was appointed a professor and head of the history department at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh.