Kirk, Grayson Louis

Kirk, Grayson Louis, 1903–97, American educator, b. Jeffersonville, Ohio, grad. Miami Univ., 1924, Ph.D. Univ. of Wisconsin, 1930. He taught at Wisconsin from 1929, then became a professor of government (1940–72) at Columbia. He contributed to the Dumbarton Oaks Conference (1944) and the San Francisco Conference (1945) during World War II. In 1949 he was named provost of Columbia; in 1953 he succeeded Dwight D. Eisenhower as university president, a post he held until 1968, when he resigned amid controversy over his handling of student unrest and over a contract between Columbia and a cigarette filter maker. He is the author of Philippine Independence (1936), Contemporary International Politics (with W. R. Sharp, 1940), and The Study of International Relations in American Colleges and Universities (1947).