Sir Michael Ernest Sadler KCSI CB (3 July 1861 – 14 October 1943) was an English historian, educationalist and university administrator.

[2] Michael Ernest Sadler, born into a radical home in 1861 at Barnsley in the industrial north of England, died in Oxford in 1943.

[3] His early youth was coloured by the fact that one of his forebears, Michael Thomas Sadler, was among the pioneers of the Factory Acts.

There he soon came under the spell of leading historians such as T. H. Green and Arnold Toynbee, but it was John Ruskin who overwhelmed him as an undergraduate.

Sadler has left on record how, in his second year at Trinity, a short course of lectures by Ruskin was announced, to be given in the Oxford University Museum.

A month earlier he had become president elect of the Oxford Union, a field of public debating experience that has produced many English politicians.

In 1895, he was appointed to a government post as director of the Office of Special Inquiries and Reports, resigning from the board of education in 1903.

Founded in 1903 by Alfred Orage, the Leeds Arts Club was an important meeting ground for radical artists, thinkers, educationalists and writers in Britain, and had strong leanings to the cultural, political and theoretical ideas coming out of Germany at this time.

In particular the aim of the Fund was to bypass the financial restraints placed on the gallery by the municipal authorities in Leeds, who had, in the opinion of Sadler, a dislike of modern art.

[2] Towards the end of the First World War, the Secretary of State for India, Austen Chamberlain, invited Sadler to accept the chairmanship of a commission the government proposed to appoint to inquire into the affairs of the University of Calcutta.

[9] The result was 13 volumes issued in 1919,[10] providing a comprehensive sociological account of the context in which Mahatma Gandhi was campaigning for the end of the British Raj and the independence of India.

And finally he told the members of the Senate: And in India you stand on the verge of the most hazardous and inevitable of adventures—the planning of primary education for the unlettered millions of a hundred various races.

[15] She was his hostess at their house in Headingley, Leeds, called Buckingham House, where Sadler's Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings were displayed in a picture gallery, receiving many cultural figures like Roger Fry and emerging artists like Henry Moore and Jacob Kramer.

In 1934 Sadler married Eva Margaret Gilpin (1868-1940), headmistress of Hall School, Weybridge, Surrey,[18] who had been the governess of his son, Michael Sadleir.