Draft:Francis S. Hutchins

Francis Hutchins and Francis Stephenson Hutchins should link here

Francis Stephenson Hutchins was a college president and author in the United States. He led Berea College from ?-?, succeeding his father.

Hutchins was born in Northfield, Alabama on August 17, 1902. He was the third and youngest son of Rev. William James Hutchins and Anna Laura (Murch) Hutchins. His brothers were Robert Maynard Hutchins and William Grosvenor Hutchins.

Education
He earned an A.B. degree from Oberlin College in 1923 and a master's degree from Yale University in 1933. While studying at Oberlin, Hutchins won a teaching assignment to the Shansi Memorial School in northern China. He taught in China from 1922-24 as part of the Oberlin/Shansi Program. . He returned to Oberlin to complete his degree, then went back to Changsha, China, in 1925 to serve as an instructor representative of the Yale-in-China Mission. After 14 years, he returned to the U.S. in 139 to lead Berea College as its fifth president--assuming the role vacated by his father, William J. Hutchins, who served as the College's president from 1920 to 1939.

Family life
Francis S. Hutchins met Louise Gilman while he was in Changsha, China, for the Yale-in-China Mission. The daughter of Episcopal missionaries, Louise earned her undergraduate degree from Wellesley in 1932. She married Francis S. Hutchins two years later. Louise earned her medical degree from Yale in 1936 and interned at Hunan Hospital in Changsha, where she cared for children and refugees fleeing the Japanese invasion. She returned to the U.S. in 1939 to join her husband in Berea, Kentucky, as he began his 28-year tenure as president of Berea College.

The couple had four children: Anne Hutchins, born in China; Francis Gilman Hutchins; William Maynard Hutchins; and Robert Lawrence Rosser-Hutchins.

President of Berea College
Francis S. Hutchins was appointed by the Berea College Board of Trustees to serve as the fifth president of the College and arrived on campus in September 1939 to be his father’s successor. The younger Hutchins led the institution post-World War II into the early years of the civil rights movement. Hutchins' tenure at Berea College included institutional reorganization and curricular development, a five-fold increase in the College's endowment, and the readmission of Black students to Berea following a 1950 modification of the Day Law by the Kentucky General Assembly.

Having been appointed a trustee of Yale-In-China Association in 1939, Hutchins served as vice-president (1939-1949) and, in 1950, was made an honorary trustee for life. Following Hutchins' retirement from Berea in 1967, he returned to China as a representative of the Association. He resided in Hong Kong from 1967 to 1970.

Berea College has photos of him in their digital collection. Yale has some records related to Hutchins.

Books by Francis S. Hutchins
Berea College; The Telescope and the Spade, published by Newcomen Society, New York, 1963