John (Jack) Rutherford Everett was born in 1918, in Portland, Oregon. His father, a Presbyterian minister, later became the president of Trinity University in San Antonio, Texas. In 1942, Everett received a degree from Park College, Missouri, in 1943, an MA in economics from Columbia University, in 1944 a Bachelor of Divinity from the Union Theological Seminary in New York, and in 1945 a PhD in philosophy from Columbia University.[1]

Beginning in 1943, Everett taught philosophy at various colleges and universities, and became the chair of the Philosophy Department at Columbia University in 1948. In 1950, he was elected president of Hollins College (now Hollins University) in Virginia. At age 31, he became the youngest college president in American history.[2]

As president of one of the nation's first colleges for women, Everett transformed the curriculum, doubled the faculty, extended the campus, and significantly increased the endowment. Enrollment also doubled during his tenure. As a college president, Everett was a member and chair of several committees on higher education, such as the advisory committee of the Council for Financial Aid to Education (later the Council for Aid to Education).[3]

In 1960, Everett resigned from Hollins and started to work with Encyclopedia Britannica as a consultant. Around the same time, he also accepted the position of chancellor of the Municipal College System of the City of New York (City University of New York after 1961). He resigned from this post in 1962 to take on the role of vice president at Encyclopedia Britannica.

Everett became president of the New School for Social Research (now, The New School) in October 1964, upon the heels of a period of institutional administrative turnover and reorganization. He would occupy the position for the next 19 years. At the time he became president, the demand in the United States for higher education sharply increased, and publicly-supported funding increased along with demand. But the national scene changed in the following years such that plummeting enrollment -- due to fluctuating demographics -- and declining government support threw many colleges into crisis. Still, as post-secondary institutions tightened their budgets and closed their doors, The New School under Everett expanded. Over the course of his presidency, The New School merged with Parsons School of Design; started an undergraduate program (later, Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts); and developed the Center for New York City Affairs into a full-scale Graduate School of Management and Urban Professions. Everett's tenure was also marked by several tumultuous episodes. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the campus was rocked by student protests, and in the late 1970s the Graduate Faculty narrowly avoided having several of its doctoral programs lose accreditation.

Responding to student protest at The New School in 1968, Everett found sympathy with young people's mistrust of those in power and emphasized that university administrators must work to promote an atmosphere of trust on campus. He adopted a position that aligned with student demands at the time, arguing that student dissatisfaction stemmed from problems with curricula development. According to Everett, faculty weren't trained to establish educational policy so the school's central administration should guide the process with input from students and faculty. He also expressed the belief that students would feel that college was more relevant if courses directly connected social science scholarship to pressing social issues.

Everett also held firm views about the issue of desegregation of schools. In a 1958 memo when he was president of Hollins College, he called the desegregation movement "propaganda." His position remained the same a decade later. In a 1968 article in The Atlantic, authored when he was president of The New School, he opposed the decentralization of New York City public schools, asserting that forced desegregation constituted "unfair competition" for African-American students who had been disadvantaged in their education and would now be held to the same standards as white students who had benefited from better schools and more resources.

Everett contributed articles to scholarly journals and wrote two books, Religion in Economics: A Study of John Bates Clark, Richard T. Ely [and] Simon N. Patten (1946) and Religion in Human Experience: An Introduction (1950).

John Everett died of cancer in 1992, in New York City.

[1] Harris, Beth S. and the Dictionary of Virginia Biography. "John R. Everett (1918–1992)." Encyclopedia Virginia. Virginia Foundation for the Humanities, 7 Sep. 2016. Web. 21 Sept. 2018. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/Everett_John_R_1918-1992#start_entry [2] ibid. [3] ibid.