Peter Pouncey

Who is Peter Pouncey?

Peter R. Pouncey is an author, classicist, and university administrator. The son of a British father and a French-British mother, he was born in Tsingtao, China. At the end of World War II, after several dislocations and separations, his family reassembled in England, and Pouncey was educated there in boarding schools and at Oxford. For a time, he studied for the Jesuit priesthood but ultimately experienced a loss of faith.

Shortly after obtaining a Ph.D. from Columbia University in 1969, he was appointed assistant professor of Greek and Latin in the Classics Department. In 1972 he took up the post of Dean at Columbia College. As Dean, he was a forceful proponent of admitting women to the college, going so far as to hold a faculty vote on the matter without the knowledge of the university's president, William McGill. Concerns about the future of Barnard College led to McGill's rejection of the proposal. In 1976, Pouncey resigned as Dean. As a member of the Classics Department, he produced a number of notable works of scholarship, including the book The necessities of war: a study of Thucydides' pessimism which won the university's Lionel Trilling Award.