Mathey College History

Mathey College was dedicated on November 6, 1983 and named after Dean Mathey '12, one of the most devoted, energetic and generous supporters of the University in modern times. His association with Princeton covered a period of 65 years.

As an undergraduate, he twice won the national intercollegiate tennis doubles championship and was captain of the tennis team his senior year. He was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and graduated with honors. After graduation, he began work as a bond salesman and built up a sizeable fortune as a partner in the Wall Street firm of Dillon, Read & Co. He was later Chairman of the Board of the Empire Trust Company and Honorary Chairman of the Bank of New York.

Dean Mathey came to live in Princeton in 1927, remodeling an old farmhouse on the property of the Drumthwacket estate (now home of New Jersey's governor) on Stockton Street. He was an alumni trustee of the University from 1927 to 1931, charter trustee from 1931 to 1960, and trustee emeritus from 1960 until his death; he served at various times on every one of the board's nine standing committees including 34 years on the Committee of Grounds and Buildings, serving as chairman from 1942 to 1949.

According to Christopher Knowlton (Fortune Magazine, Oct. 26, 1987), Dean Mathey's actions as chairman of Princeton University's investment committee twice helped preserve Princeton's endowment: prior to the great Crash of 1929, when he moved the endowment from stocks into bonds; and midway through WWII, when he sold off 80% of the university's bonds and replaced them with common stock holdings. In each case, Knowlton judges it to have been an "exquisitely timed maneuver" that greatly augmented the endowment. In reply to critics of his actions in the 1940s, he is said to have replied: "The only true test of conservatism is to be right in the future."

In Men and Gothic Towers, a book of Princeton reminiscences, Dean Mathey recalled prior to becoming a student at Princeton, spending a night in Blair Hall and hearing students singing by Nassau Hall, and enjoying the "lovely starlit early May evening", "a medley of sentiment, humor, loyalty to Alma Mater and the nation", as well as "Blair Arch with its spectacular steps, the clock in the tower and the dormitories! Just to think I might some day be living in rooms like these! It seemed then it might be like a knight living in a feudal castle at King Arthur's Court..."

(Source: A Princeton Companion, Alexander Leitch, pgs. 320-321)

The Historic Buildings of Mathey College include:

Edwards Hall - completed 1880
Blair Hall - 1897 & 1907
Little Hall - 1898-1901
Campbell Hall - 1909
Hamilton Hall - 1911-1912
Madison dining halls & common rooms – 1917
Joline Hall - 1933

For more information, view The Evolution of the Princeton Campus.