Potts ’60 Honored with Babbidge Award for Book on Wesleyan’s History

Wesleyan University, 1910-1970: Academic Ambition and Middle-Class America, by David Potts ’60 is the winner of the 2016 Homer D. Babbidge Jr. Award “for the best study of a significant aspect of Connecticut history.”

The book, published by Wesleyan University Press in 2015, has received critical acclaim from a variety of sources including, History of Education Quarterly and Connecticut History Review. Reviews in American History states, “Wesleyan University, 1910-1970 is one of the strongest institutional histories of an American college or university and covers in vivid detail every conceivable aspect of the institution, from finances and board priorities, to professors’ abilities and student aspirations, from building projects, to town-gown relations.”   

Potts’ book also won the Wesleyan’s James L. McConaughy Jr. Memorial Award for “writings by a member of the Wesleyan family that conveys unusual insight and understanding of current or past events.” Additionally, his first volume on Wesleyan’s history, Wesleyan University, 1831-1910: Collegiate Enterprise in New England, published by Yale Press, 1992, also won the Babbidge Award.