Benjamin Ide Wheeler

Their only son, Benjamin Ide Wheeler, had his education first in the public schools of Haverhill and Saco, Maine.

In the following autumn he entered Brown University where he was a member of the Brunonian chapter of the Alpha Delta Phi Fraternity.

In the spring of 1885, he received on examination at Heidelberg the degree of Doctor of Philosophy, summa cum laude, presenting a thesis under Hermann Osthoff entitled Der griechische Nominalaccent, afterwards published at Strassburg as a separate book.

[4] Joseph Wright, future Corpus Christi Professor of Comparative Philology at Oxford, completed his PhD the same year as Wheeler and also writing his thesis under Osthoff.

[2] During the 1906 San Francisco earthquake and fire he was a member of Mayor Eugene Schmitz's Committee of Fifty.

During World War I his "well-known German sympathies and admiration for the kaiser"[6] brought suspicion upon him and he retired as President of the University of California after the armistice.

Several notable people have received the award:[8] Wheeler authored Analogy in Language (1887); Introduction to the Study of the History of Language (1890); Organization of the Higher Education in the United States (1896), published in Munich; Dionysos and Immortality (1899); Life of Alexander the Great (1900); Instruction and Democracy in America (1910) (published in Strassburg, Germany).

[2] A commencement address at the University of Michigan titled The old world in the new, an address delivered at the commencement exercises of the University of Michigan, June 30, 1898, was published in the August 1898 issue of The Atlantic[12] and Art in Language was published in the December 1900 issue.