Assistant to President Professor of History Acting Director Chairman Merton College, Oxford, Rhodes Scholar, 1953 (B.A.
Merton College Charitable Corporation Prosser Gifford was a historian, author, and academic administrator.
[1] For his undergraduate education Prosser attended Yale College and graduated with a degree in English Literature in 1951.
After his work at Swarthmore, Prosser returned to his student status to pursue a PhD in history at Yale University.
[1] In Lusaka he conducted research at the national archives, supported in part by a generous fellowship he received in 1963 from the Foreign Area Program of the Ford Foundation.
[7] Right after completing his PhD, Prosser was hired by Yale as an assistant professor in African History where he taught both undergraduates and graduates.
Perhaps most significantly at this early point in his academic career, Prosser was appointed in 1965 as the Founding Director of President Kingman Brewster Jr.'s 5-Year B.A.
[8][9] Moreover, Prosser substantially contributed to the development of the 5-College system in the region, and as Dean of Faculty shepherded Amherst through the Civil Rights takeover at the college in 1970.
His skills in this realm put him on the short list of candidates for Yale University's search for a new president in 1977.
He established councils, appointed chairs, identified additional resources for junior fellows and supervised the selection process of their Kluge Prize for Achievement in the Study of Humanity.