James Ormsbee Murray

Bio/Description

James Ormsbee Murray (1827-1899) served as Princeton’s inaugural dean of the faculty, a position he held from 1883 to 1899. A minister by training, Murray served the University as a classics professor and administrator for nearly three decades.

The University’s oldest and highest-ranking deanship was established by the Board of Trustees, charging the dean of the faculty “with oversight of whatever does not pertain directly to the work of instruction, such in particular as the discipline of the College, the assignment of rooms and the sanitary condition of the Institution.”

“The office was at first a difficult one,” Professor George McLean Harper later noted in a biographical sketch, “for it included discipline and the enforcement of standards of scholarship, but Dean Murray soon obtained general goodwill without sacrificing just severity.”

A graduate of Brown University, Class of 1850, and Andover Theological Seminary, Class of 1854, Murray was a minister by training. However, he jumped at the opportunity to teach the words of Shakespeare and Wordsworth alongside the scriptural classics. Murray was the Holmes Professor of Belles Lettres and English Literature from 1875 to 1899, a position he held concurrently with his 17-year deanship tenure.

Murray remained active in the church while at Princeton, serving on the board of directors of Princeton Seminary from 1874 until his death.

Dean Murray's lasting legacy was his introduction of the honor system in 1893, the first in the Ivy League. Murray wrote and presented an honor system resolution at a faculty meeting on behalf of a group of students who asked the administration “to be put upon their honor as gentlemen” in exams. It passed, assigning Murray the duty of judging disciplinary cases.

Murray spent over two decades serving the University and laid the foundation for future officeholders of the dean of the faculty.

Written by Shane B. Black for the Office of the Dean of the Faculty.