When Bob Connor joined the Teagle Foundation as its new president in May 2003, it was his third career. After undergraduate work at Hamilton College and graduate work at Oxford and Princeton, he taught ancient Greek and Roman history at the University of Michigan and then at Princeton.

“I retired from Princeton in 1989 with the polysyllabic and sonorous title ‘Andrew Fleming West Professor of Classics, emeritus’ and promptly moved to North Carolina to begin a new career. As President and Director of the National Humanities Center, an independent center for advanced study in literature, history, philosophy and all the other humanistic fields, I had thirteen years full of intellectual excitement and financial challenges. I enjoyed every minute of them, but by the end of 2002 was eager to return to some scholarship of my own.”

At that point, however, the Teagle Foundation and Bob began the conversations that resulted in his third career, as head of the philanthropic Teagle Foundation in New York City. “I often told my students that a liberal education was the best preparation for the multiple careers they were likely to have in a rapidly changing economy. Now I know first hand that it’s true. That belief in the value of a liberal education is one reason I was glad to have the opportunity to work with a foundation that has been committed to strengthening higher education, ever since Walter Teagle established it in 1944. I want the Teagle Foundation to do everything it can to carry on that tradition, particularly in the liberal arts.”

Bob’s best known book is probably his study of the ancient historical writer Thucydides (Thucydides, Princeton University Press, 1984) but he has published extensively on Athenian political and cultural history. In addition he and his wife Carolyn, a byzantinist who teaches at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, have co-authored a translation and commentary on the life of the tenth century holy man, St. Luke of Steiris (Hellenic College Press, 1994). Callie and Bob have two grown children, two grandchildren, and live in a mid-nineteenth century farmhouse in Hillsborough, North Carolina.