David Alexander, Architecture Fan and Former Pomona College President, Dies at 77

By the time David Alexander became one of my favorite college presidents, in the early 1990s, he was already Pomona College’s president emeritus. He and his wife, Catharine, had bought themselves a place right by the campus, a lovely but largely overlooked cottage by the famous Arts and Crafts architects Charles Sumner Greene and Henry Mather Greene.

I wangled an invitation for cocktails, partly because I wanted to see the house, which had become something of an obsession for the Alexanders, and partly because I remembered from a couple of previous meetings that Mr. Alexander was endlessly entertaining. He did not disappoint, happily showing off details of the 1903 house, gleefully telling story after story about Pomona and about higher education in general, and making me feel as though we had been the best of friends for decades.

Mr. Alexander, who died Monday at age 77, was president of Pomona from 1969 to 1991, taking office at age 37. Before that he was president of what is now Rhodes College (where I once spotted a picture of him in a Gothic dining commons), and he was the American secretary of the Rhodes Scholarship Trust from 1981 to 1998. Pomona has posted an obituary that lists his many accomplishments as an administrator and a scholar—his speciality was the history of the Bible—but it was the joy with which he told stories and made friends that always seemed to me to set him apart.

When I interviewed Virginia Crosby, an emerita professor of French at Pomona who had written a murder mystery set on a fictional college campus, Mr. Alexander welcomed us to his office, which Ms. Crosby had used as a model for the office in which the president of her fictional institution was killed. “I hope it wasn’t someone six-three who weighed a bit too much and had beautiful blond hair,” he said with a laugh. (It was, but he didn’t know it yet.) And when I was interviewing a Pitzer College student who was the caretaker of Pitzer’s own Arts and Crafts-era Grove House, the Alexanders welcomed us both for drinks and a tour of their home. I can’t imagine that any historic house could want better or more enthusiastic caretakers than the Alexanders.

The Alexanders sold the house a while back, moving to a retirement community a few blocks away, but they kept a lively interest in the Greene and Greene house as new owners continued the improvements they had begun. And Mr. Alexander lost nothing of his delight at going out for a good meal and telling stories, new and old. I’m already planning a toast to his memory.