Theodore D. Lockwood was the 15th president of Trinity College, from 1968 to 1981.

Lockwood was born in Hanover, New Hampshire on December 5, 1924. He served in the U.S. Army in Italy during World War II. Then, he enrolled at Trinity College, one year after his father Harold J. Lockwood took over the chairmanship of the Engineering Department at the College. While a student, Lockwood lettered in football, served as the Trinity Review's art editor, held numerous leadership roles, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He also graduated as valedictorian in 1948. He earned a PhD in history from Princeton in 1952, subsequently serving as Provost, Dean of the Faculty, and Professor of History at Union College in Schenectady, New York. During the 1960s, he taught European history as a visiting professor during Trinity's summer sessions.

Theodore Lockwood, ca. 1970. Photo credit: Fabian Bachrach courtesy of Trinity College Archives

After serving as a member of the Board of Fellows and an alumni trustee for some time, in January 1967, Lockwood was asked to serve as Trinity College’s president. During his decade-plus years as president, Lockwood sought to speak to the needs of students concerned about racial justice, social betterment, and generational change. In April 1968, he was one of the trustees locked in Downes Memorial by the students demanding greater funding for Black scholarships. Nonetheless, he recommended a relatively light discipline of subjecting the sit-in participants to having “disciplinary probation” placed on their record cards.

While President, Lockwood helped ensure Trinity College became co-educational, though his rationale for supporting the move was more to align the College with its peers than any deep ideological commitment to coeducation. In spring 1969, during his second semester as president, the Board of Trustees and he allowed female students from Vassar College to study at Trinity, while some Trinity men studied at various women's colleges. The following year, female students were officially admitted and the first four women graduated from Trinity College.

In the mid-1970s, Lockwood served as director and later chairman of the Association of American Colleges, a group with 800 member institutions. In addition to thinking deeply about administrative leadership, Lockwood also diversified Trinity College’s faculty and administration. He increased the number of women and people of color within the College’s staff, thereby helping to ensure greater representation of gender and ethnic diversity at Trinity College. With the help of President Lockwood’s persistence to enact admission reforms, Trinity College was eventually to become a college where at least 50 percent of its students were female.

In 1977, President Lockwood created an Institutional Priorities Council composed of students, faculty, and administrators, which released a report a year later that specified reforms to be fulfilled over a five year period. That same year, he hired James F. English, Jr., to be Trinity's first Vice President for Finance and Planning, again indicating Lockwood's emphasis on long-range planning. Still, he was circumspect about spending money on new computer systems. On the other hand, a new President's house was built and opened in 1978.

Theodore Lockwood was awarded an honorary Doctor of Letters from Trinity in 1981. In January of 1982 he left Trinity and moved to New Mexico, where he became the founding president of United World College. On January 21, 2019, Lockwood died peacefully at his home in Stowe, Vermont, at the age of 94.

Albert Charles Jacobs H’68

James Fairfield English, Jr. H’89

Trinity College in the Twentieth Century (2000) by Peter and Anne Knapp, pp. 157, 170, 293, 329-331, 337, 357, 365-368, 370, 376, 383, 385-386, 389, 413, 432, 437 fn. 10.