David Starr Jordan

David Starr Jordan (January 19, 1851–September 19, 1931) was a leading ichthyologist, educator and peace activist. He was president of Indiana University and Stanford University.

Born into a farm family of Gainesville, New York, he entered the newly-established Cornell University as an undergraduate in 1866, and received a master's degree in 1872; he was an instructor in botany at Cornell beginning in 1870.

He then moved to Indianapolis and acquired an MD from Indiana Medical College (1875), after lecturing in 1874 on marine botany at the Anderson summer school of natural history at Penikese island , Massachusetts, and on botany and ichthyology at the Harvard School of Geology in 1875.

He earned Ph.D. from Butler University in 1878, taking up a professorship in science at Indiana University the following year. In 1879 was appointed to a similar chair in Indiana University.

From 1879 through 1881 he was a special agent of the United States census for the marine industries of the Pacific coast, and he also held appointments at various times with United States Fish Commission , beginning in 1877 and extending through 1891.

He was appointed president of Indiana University on January 1, 1885, and then went to Stanford in 1891 to become its first president, later becoming its chancellor in 1913, in order to have more time available for his peace activities (a new trustee by the name of Herbert Hoover helped arrange this). Jordan retired in 1916.

He was president of the California Academy of Sciences from 1896 to 1904 and after 1908. He was also president of the World Peace Foundation from 1910 to 1914 and chaired the World Peace Conference in 1915.

Jordan was an extremely prolific writer, with 650 articles and books on ichthyology alone, and 1,400 other works. As of 1881, Jordan had already published about 250 papers on North American ichthyology, also the Manual of the Vertebrates of the Northern Unites States.

The NOAA research vessel David Starr Jordan is named in his honor, as is the David Starr Jordan High School in Los Angeles, California, the Jordan River flowing through the Indiana University Bloomington campus and Jordan Avenue in Bloomington.

Notable works

• Manual of the Vertebrates of the Northern United States (1876)
• Life's Enthusiasms (1906)
• Days of a Man (1922) - autobiography
• The Blood of the Nation
• War and Waste
• Ways of Lasting Peace
• Democracy and World Relations
• Imperial Democracy
• Shore Fishes of Hawaii

Reference

• Edward McNall Burns , David Starr Jordan: Prophet of Freedom (Stanford, 1953)
• Alice N. Hays , David Starr Jordan: A Bibliography of His Writings 1871-1931 (Stanford, 1952)

External link

• History of Stanford motto, with Jordan bio info