List of Earlham College people

The following is a list of notable people associated with Earlham College, a private liberal arts college in Richmond, Indiana.

A–M

 * Carl W. Ackerman — first head of the Columbia University School of Journalism
 * Marjorie Hill Allee – author
 * Warder Clyde Allee – known for his research on animal behavior, protocooperation, and for identifying the Allee effect; elected to the National Academy of Sciences
 * John S. Allen – founding president of the University of South Florida; interim president of the University of Florida
 * Gertrude Bonnin (Zitkala-Sä) – writer, Native American activist, founded National Council of Indian Americans
 * Greg Burdwood – State Legislator in the New Hampshire House of Representatives
 * Rick Carter – head football coach, College of the Holy Cross; his 1983 team remains the only Holy Cross team to ever qualify for the NCAA Division I-AA playoffs; N.C.A.A. Division I-AA Coach of the Year
 * Al Cobine – big band leader and tenor saxophonist; worked closely with Henry Mancini and often associated with the Pink Panther theme song
 * Jana E. Compton – research ecologist with the Environmental Protection Agency
 * Joseph John Copeland – former president of City College of New York
 * Ione Virginia Hill Cowles – president, General Federation of Women's Clubs
 * Garfield V. Cox – attended but did not graduate; Dean of the University of Chicago School of Business, 1942–1952
 * David W. Dennis – Congressman from Indiana
 * Juan Dies – co-founder and executive director of Sones de Mexico Ensemble; nominated for a Latin Grammy
 * Christoper Dilts – Senior Photographer at Obama for America 2012
 * Joseph M. Dixon – Congressman, Senator, 7th Governor of Montana
 * Liza Donnelly – cartoonist for the New Yorker
 * John Porter East – former U.S. Senator for North Carolina
 * Brigadier General Bonner F. Fellers – General MacArthur's psychological warfare director during World War II; during the subsequent occupation of Japan, worked with fellow Earlhamite Isshiki Yuri (see below) to persuade MacArthur to preserve the institution of the Emperor and clear Emperor Hirohito of war crimes
 * Jim Fowler – star of Wild Kingdom
 * Lew Frederick (Lewis Reed Frederick) – member of the Oregon House of Representatives 2010–2016; Member Oregon State Senate 2017–present; Outstanding Alumni Award 2013
 * Reverend Wilda C.Gafney – priest and bible scholar
 * Sara Gelser – member of the Oregon House of Representatives 2005-2014 and member of the Oregon State Senate 2015–present) Outstanding Alumni Award 2016; Recognized as one of Time Magazine's "Person of the Year" Silence Breakers in 2017
 * Andrew Ginther – Mayor of Columbus, Ohio, 2016–present
 * Robert Graham – Endowed Chair, Department of Family Medicine, University of Cincinnati Medical Center; elected to the National Academy of Sciences, Institute of Medicine
 * Tim Grimm – played FBI agent Dan Murray alongside Harrison Ford in the film Clear and Present Danger (1994)
 * David Grosso — City Council Member for the District of Columbia
 * Mary Haas – linguist, pioneer in the field of Siamese language studies; former President of the Linguistic Society of America
 * William Hadley – established the Hadley School for the Blind
 * Michael C. Hall – actor on HBO's Six Feet Under and star of Showtime's Dexter, for which he was nominated for an Emmy and won Golden Globe and Screen Actors Guild awards
 * Margaret Hamilton – headed the team that wrote the onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program
 * Helen Hansma – Researcher Emeritus and Associate Adjunct Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara
 * Robert M. Hirsch – former Chief Hydrologist and head of water science for the United States Geological Survey
 * Emily Caroline Chandler Hodgin – temperance reformer
 * Mary Inda Hussey – Semitic text authority; first woman to teach at the American Society for Oriental Research in Jerusalem
 * John Herndon James – Chief Justice of the 4th Court of Civil Appeals in San Antonio
 * C. Francis Jenkins – demonstrated the first practical motion picture projector
 * Walter Jessup – former head of the Carnegie Corporation and president of the University of Iowa
 * Henry Underwood Johnson – US Congressman from Indiana
 * Mary Coffin Johnson (1834-1928) – temperance activist, newspaper publisher
 * Robert Underwood Johnson – former US Ambassador to Italy
 * Andrew Johnston – film critic for Time Out New York, Us Weekly, Radar magazine; Editor of the "Time In" section; TV critic for Time Out New York
 * Joseph Henry Kibbey – Territorial Governor of Arizona
 * Peter D. Klein – chaired Rutgers University's Department of Philosophy
 * Frances Moore Lappé – activist and author of three-million-copy bestseller Diet for a Small Planet
 * Simone Leigh – noted multimedia and ceramic artist
 * Maurice Manning – Pulitzer Prize finalist poet
 * Howard Marmon – former president of the American Society of Automotive Engineers
 * Manning Marable – professor at Columbia University; author of Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention, which won a Pulitzer Prize in 2012
 * Robert Meeropol – founder of the Rosenberg Fund for Children, attorney, college professor and activist; son of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg
 * Edward Matney – received an Emmy for a 1998 segment of Nightline on the Clinton White House
 * Dan McCoy – writer for The Daily Show and host of The Flop House podcast
 * Elephant Micah (real name Joseph O'Connell) – lo-fi recording artist
 * Morris Hadley Mills – Indiana State Senator
 * Molly R. Morris – ecologist, professor at Ohio University

N–Z

 * William Penn Nixon – publisher of the Chicago Inter Ocean and president of the Associated Press
 * Larry Overman – organic chemist, member of the National Academy of Sciences
 * Josh Penn – producer of Beasts of the Southern Wild, which won the narrative grand jury prize and the cinematography award at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2012 and was nominated for the Best Picture Oscar in 2013
 * Robert Quine – named by Rolling Stone as one of the 100 greatest guitarists of all time
 * Marc Reisner – author of the books A Dangerous Place and Cadillac Desert
 * David Rovics – singer/songwriter and activist
 * José Royo – CEO of Ascent Media Group, a provider of large-scale digital services to creative media companies, including film studios
 * Olive Rush – artist
 * Rock Scully – manager of The Grateful Dead 1965–1985
 * Andrea Seabrook – contributor to National Public Radio's All Things Considered and former Congressional correspondent for NPR
 * David Shear – US Ambassador to Vietnam
 * William E. Simkin – helped prevent national strikes and resolved thousands of labor disputes as the federal government's chief labor mediator and as a leading private arbitrator
 * Ruth Hinshaw Spray – peace activist
 * Wendell Meredith Stanley – biochemist, shared a 1946 Nobel Prize for discovering methods of producing pure enzymes and virus proteins
 * Laura Sessions Stepp – Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist for The Washington Post
 * Edwin Way Teale – naturalist writer; won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 1966; elected fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science; staff writer at Popular Science
 * Nellie Teale (1900–1993) – naturalist
 * Ralph Waldo Trueblood – Editor-in-Chief of The Los Angeles Times (1934–37); co-inventor of the telephotographer, the first device used by newspapers for sending pictures by wire
 * Summia Tora – Afghan activist
 * Thomas Trueblood – President of the National Society of Elocutionists; his golf teams won two NCAA National Championships and five Big Ten Conference championships
 * Harold Urey – received the Chemistry Nobel prize in 1934; known for his discovery of deuterium and the Miller–Urey experiment


 * Martha Valentine, President, Richmond (Indiana) Women's Christian Temperance Union, member, Earlham Board of Trustees, 1865-1867. 


 * Frederick Van Nuys – U.S. Senator from Indiana 1932–1944
 * Amy Walters – producer, National Public Radio
 * Zach Warren – ran the Boston Marathon while juggling in 2 hours, fifty-eight minutes
 * Newton K. Wesley – Japanese American optometrist; early developer of commercially successful rigid contact lenses in the 1950s
 * Herman Brenner White – physicist
 * Don Wildman – actor and host of TV travel shows including Ushuaia, Men's Journal and Cities of the Underworld on The History Channel
 * Mary Chawner Woody – President, North Carolina Woman's Christian Temperance Union
 * Harry N. Wright – President of City College of New York, mathematician

Notable faculty

 * William W. Biddle – social scientist and a major contributor to the study of community development and propaganda
 * Landrum Bolling – President of Earlham from 1958 to 1973; Director at Large of Mercy Corps; back channel between Yasir Arafat and Jimmy Carter
 * Wayne C. Booth – former Professor of English; literary critic; author of The Rhetoric of Fiction and The Company We Keep
 * Anna Cox Brinton and Howard Brinton – Quaker scholars and administrators
 * John Elwood Bundy – impressionist painter
 * Evan Ira Farber – Emeritus Library Director, named Academic Research Librarian of the Year in 1980
 * Del Harris – former Earlham basketball coach; current NBA coach
 * Robert L. Kelly – former Earlham College president, made Chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government
 * Thomas R. Kelly – author of A Testament of Devotion
 * Dale Edwin Noyd – decorated fighter pilot and Air Force captain who became a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War
 * E. Merrill Root – poet
 * Peter Suber – Professor of Philosophy Emeritus, creator of the game Nomic, and a leader in the open access movement
 * D. Elton Trueblood – Quaker author and theologian