Martin Meyerson

Who was Martin Meyerson?

Martin Meyerson was a United States city planner and academic leader best known as the President of the University of Pennsylvania between 1970 and 1981.

Meyerson was born in Brooklyn in 1922 and graduated from Columbia University. After a brief period working in the Philadelphia City Planning Commission, he started teaching at the University of Chicago. He obtained his master's degree in city planning from Harvard University.

Meyerson started work as an associate professor at Penn before working at Harvard. He then became Dean of the College of Environmental Design at the University of California, Berkeley. Meyerson was acting Chancellor in 1965 during the Free Speech Movement and is credited with helping to defuse the tension that had built up on that campus.

He left Berkeley to become the President of what is now the State University of New York at Buffalo. Meyerson became President of Penn in 1970. During his term as President, he consolidated several colleges and programs into the school of arts and sciences and introduced its first affirmative action and equal opportunity programs for minorities and women.