John Martin Thomas was Penn State’s ninth president and served from April 1921 to June 1925. During his term Penn State was thwarted by a frugal state government and animosity from the state’s governor. This negated many of his ambitious plans, although he initiated significant programs brought to completion by his successor.
“We must either do a big thing or nothing at all,” Thomas said in his inauguration speech. He had a big thing in mind when he spoke those words. The small Pennsylvania State College, he believed, should become a large flagship state university like the universities of Wisconsin and Minnesota, which had also emerged from the land-grant movement.
He wanted Pennsylvania State College to become The Pennsylvania State University. It ought to be wholly owned by the commonwealth and be the capstone institution in the state’s public school system. The state legislature should make Penn State the sole recipient of its higher education appropriations. As a full partner with the state, Penn State should plan on an enrollment of 10,000 undergraduates. In 1921 the college had about 3,000.
It was a bold scheme from a man who had an unbroken record of professional achievement. In his youth, Thomas was a successful beekeeper in Port Henry, New York, developing markets as far away as Chicago and paying his way through Middlebury College in the process. He attended Union Theological Seminary, becoming an ordained Presbyterian minister at the age of 23. His first charge was a small, struggling congregation in East Orange, New Jersey, and he developed it into a large, influential church. Called back by Middlebury to become its president in 1908, he lifted it, over thirteen years, into the first rank of America’s liberal arts colleges.
He saw in small, underfunded Penn State a hidden gem that could be transformed into a powerhouse, and he had a detailed strategy to accomplish this. It involved larger appropriations from the legislature, bond issues from both the commonwealth and the college, and a $2 million capital fund drive aimed at alumni.
However, Thomas ran into a roadblock when Gifford Pinchot became governor in 1923. Pinchot, a Yale graduate, had little regard for public higher education and an enmity toward Thomas that may have sprung from Thomas allowing George Alter, Pinchot’s foe in the gubernatorial primary election, to speak on campus during the 1922 campaign.
Pinchot demanded that Penn State end its degree program in forestry. He said the state did not need two forestry programs; there already was another at the Pennsylvania State Forest Academy, at Mont Alto, in Franklin County, which was not, at that time, affiliated with Penn State. Pinchot argued from a position of strength. He was the nation’s premier forestry professional, founder of the U.S. Forest Service, and had been a trusted adviser to President Theodore Roosevelt.
When Pinchot felt that Penn State was dragging its feet on ending its forestry program, he threatened the college’s state appropriation. After the legislature allotted the college more than he thought it should, he used the line-item veto to reduce it severely, He also vetoed the college’s bond issue request that had been approved by the legislature. The upshot was a financial crisis. Through two biennial budget cycles—in 1923 and 1925—Penn State was left with less funding than it had in 1921.
Pinchot asked the State Council of Education, an advisory board, for an opinion on whether Penn State should become a university. The council said no, and not until 1954 did Penn State achieve that goal. The distinction was important. Colleges focus primarily on undergraduate education, while universities are expected to offer advanced degrees and generate significant research.
University status would have signaled the need for increased state support. The council also recommended keeping in place the established formula whereby the legislature divided its higher education appropriations among three private universities—Pitt, Temple, and Penn—as well as Penn State.
The final straw for Thomas came in early 1925 when Pinchot charged him with “starving” the agriculture program in favor of other academic units, most notably engineering. Pinchot reached into Penn State’s appropriation and took $100,000 from liberal arts and $100,000 from engineering and gave it to agriculture. Thomas could not stand that level of micromanagement from the governor. He resigned in June 1925 and became president of Rutgers University.
Pinchot’s actions delayed by years and even decades progress at Penn State and shaped its relationship to the commonwealth to this day. Penn State never became the “full partner” of the state that Thomas envisioned it would be. The state did not take ownership of the institution and it remains simply “state related.” Penn State never became the sole recipient of the legislature’s appropriations and stills share them with Pitt, Temple, and Penn.
Thomas’s losing battle with Pinchot, however, was not the sum of his presidency. The $2 million capital fund drive, while falling short of its goal, provided monies to build two badly needed residence halls (Watts and Irvin) that are still in use today. The effort also produced funds to construct buildings after Thomas left: Recreation Hall, the Grange Building, and an infirmary.
While not permitted to change Penn State from a college to a university, Thomas made sure that it functioned as a university in all but name. He started the graduate school in 1922. After a difficult battle with faculty, he launched the School of Education. He reorganized and modernized science education.
Thomas was a catalyst during his fifty months as Penn State’s president. He put in motion projects that were advanced under his successor, Ralph Dorn Hetzel. An $8 million state bond issue for campus buildings first championed by Thomas was finally placed before Pennsylvania voters in Hetzel’s term. Although the bond measure failed narrowly, its strong showing was seen by the legislature as a mandate for greater funding for Penn State, which followed. And Hetzel continued Thomas’s emphasis on graduate education, doing so in every college department.
Still, there is irony in the fact that Penn State has recognized Gifford Pinchot—a man who was no friend of Penn State—by naming a University Park campus residence hall for him, but there are no monuments on campus to Thomas. Thomas Street in State College is named for him.
Thomas served as president of Rutgers from 1925 to 1930, where he made progress but also ran into some of the same financial issues he experienced at Penn State. He then became vice president of an insurance company in Vermont until 1938 when he re-entered higher education as president of Norwich College until 1944. He died in Rutland, Vermont, in 1952 at the age of 82.
Dick Jones
Sources:
Addison County Independent, Middlebury, VT, February 29, 1952, p. 1.
Bezilla, Michael, Penn State: An Illustrated History (University Park, PA, Penn State University Press, 1985).
Bezilla, Michael, The College of Engineering at Penn State: A Century in the Land-Grant Tradition (University Park, PA, Penn State University Press, 1996).
Dunaway, Wayland Fuller, History of The Pennsylvania State College (Lancaster, PA, Lancaster Press, Inc., 1946).
John M. Thomas file, Penn State University Libraries, Archival Collections.
John M. Thomas folder, Box 1507, Gifford Pinchot Papers (Washington, D.C., The Library of Congress).
Office of the President Records, Penn State University Libraries, Archival Collections.
State College folder, Box 1418, Gifford Pinchot Papers (Washington. D.C., The Library of Congress).
Runkle, Erwin W., The Pennsylvania State College 1853-1932: Interpretation and Record (State College, PA, The Nittany Valley Society, Inc., 2013).
First Published: July 24, 2026