Francis Joseph Mullin

Who was Francis Joseph Mullin?

Francis Joseph Mullin, also often known as F.J. Mullin or Joe Mullin, was an American academic and the seventh president of Shimer College. He was an Episcopalian, and was key in engineering the Shimer's brief period as an Episcopal-affiliated college.

From 1936 to 1938 Mullin was on the faculty of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston. Mullin served as a professor of medicine at the University of Chicago from 1939 to 1951, as well as serving as dean of students there for part of this time. He also served as dean of the faculties and professor of physiology at Chicago Medical School from 1951 to 1954.

In 1954 he assumed the presidency of Shimer College, then located in Mount Carroll, Illinois. Shimer had adopted a four-year Great Books curriculum in 1950. Mullin sought to build "a community of scholars where intellectual inquiry is the highest value". The college at the time had extremely low levels of fundraising, due in part to its previous history as a junior college. Mullin tripled fundraising to approximately $150,000 per year, but nonetheless the college faced insolvency in the summer of 1956. By recruiting General Motors executive Nelson Dezendorf as a donor and trustee, Mullin was able to keep the college open.