Distinguished Alumni Award -

William F. Kieffer '36

Article from Wooster Magazine, Summer 1981

Three of Wooster’s notable graduates received Distinguished Alumni Awards at a ceremony in Freedlander Theatre during Alumni Weekend. Honored for the vocational achievement, service to mankind, and continuing interest in the College were: Frank W. Notestein ’23, William F. Kieffer ’36, and Emma Wooding Foley ’38.

Dr. Notestein, a Phi Beta Kappa who received his doctorate from Cornell University in 1926, began his professional career teaching  economics at that institution. He later moved into the field of population research and became Director of Population Research at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public Affairs at Princeton in 1936, a position he held until 1959. From 1945 to 1959 he was also a professor of demography at Princeton.

In 1959 he became president of the Population Council, a non-profit organization dedicated to fostering knowledge about bio-medical and social aspects of population questions.

The citation for the award was given by Thomas J. Espenshade ’65, a demographer and former student of Notestein who is now Senior Research Associate of The Urban Institute in Washington D.C.

Dr. Kieffer, another Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Wooster, received a master’s degree from Ohio State University and a doctorate from Brown University in 1940. He taught chemistry for two years at Brown, four years at Western Reserve University, and from 1946 until his retirement in 1980 at The College of Wooster. This spring he has been a visiting professor at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis.

He has previously been a visiting professor at Stanford and at a University of California at Santa Cruz, a researcher at the Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and a National Science Foundation Faculty Fellow at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

He is the author of two science texts, The Mole Concept, and numerous articles, and for twelve years was editor of The Journal of Chemical Education. He was honored as an outstanding teacher by the Manufacturing Chemists Association and he also received an award in Chemical Society.

Professor Theodore Williams of the College Chemistry Department presented the citation to Kieffer.

Erma Foley, an instructor in the Sociology Department of Santa Monica City College, received teacher certification at the University of Pennsylvania in 1955 and a master’s degree in psychology from the University of Cincinnati in 1962.

She was an editor in the U.S. Bureau of National Affairs in Washington, D.C., a writer for Personnel Journal, and taught in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, and Cincinnati before moving to California.

She is past president of the Crippled Children’s Guild of Los Angeles Orthopedic Foundation, a member of the board of directors of the Crippled Children League and a volunteer leader for the Senior Citizens Tour Group of the “Y.”

She has been active in the affairs of the Wooster Alumni Association and served on the Alumni Board from 1971 to 1973. She was its president in 1975.

Her citation was presented by Jane Gruber Alexander ’38, a teacher from Princeton, New Jersey, who was her college roommate.

All three of this year’s recipients are married to Wooster alumni, and each alluded to the circumstance and credited the spouse with having a large share in the accomplishments for which the awards were given. The spouses are: Daphne Limbach Notestein ’23, Elaine Steele Kieffer ’37, and J. Herbert Foley ’35.