Greene, Arthur Maurice, Jr.

Greene, Arthur Maurice, Jr. (1872-1953), was the principal organizer of the School of Engineering and served as its first dean. He had previously taught at the University of Pennsylvania (his alma mater), Drexel Institute of Technology, the University of Missouri, and Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He accepted the call to Princeton primarily because of its traditional emphasis on liberal arts courses as integral parts of an engineering curriculum. ``The imagination of the engineer,'' he held, ``should be equal to that of the novelist, the artist, the poet, or the preacher, for in many respects the work of all these creators is the same.''

When Greene came in 1922 to organize the newly formed School of Engineering, he served not only as dean but as chairman of the new Department of Mechanical Engineering. As the only professor in that department, he carried a teaching load that would have been the despair of many younger colleagues. An undergraduate said in the Alumni Weekly that the only exercise Greene could find time for was that he got hurrying from one engagement to another, and that the best one could hope for was a fleeting glimpse of him leaving his class in hydraulics for an hour in his office before returning for another class in thermodynamics.

A born teacher and tireless worker, he wrote ten textbooks, served as president of the Society for the Promotion of Engineering Education, and designed the campus power plants at Missouri, Rensselaer, and Princeton.

Following his formal retirement in 1940, which climaxed a teaching career of almost half a century, Dean Greene continued to give a graduate course in engineering economics through 1952, thus achieving his ambition to teach until he was eighty.

From Alexander Leitch, A Princeton Companion, copyright Princeton University Press (1978).