Theodore Wood Friend III (August 27, 1931 – November 4, 2020)[1] was an American historian, novelist, and teacher, and a former president of Swarthmore College.
He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Theodore Jr. and Jessica H. (née Merrick) Friend (known as Dorie).
In 1959, Friend joined the history faculty of the State University of New York at Buffalo, where he taught for 14 years.
He was president emeritus of Eisenhower Fellowships; he then continued as a trustee of its national and international board.
The country was also in the midst of the Vietnam War and the Watergate crisis; confidence in the nation's leadership was at a low ebb.
Six weeks after he began work in Parrish Hall, Friend found that his office had been trashed by students who were protesting America's engagement in Vietnam — a war that he had long publicly opposed.
The Program also supported construction of Cornell Science Library, Ware Pool, and Mertz Hall, as well as improvements to several academic buildings.
[6] As president, Friend built the organization's endowment and brought to the U.S. the first fellows from China, El Salvador, Mozambique, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.
He also served for many years as a senior fellow in the Asia Program at the Foreign Policy Research Institute.
And in 2011, he published Woman, Man, and God in Modern Islam, a comparative study of the life of women in Indonesia, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Turkey.