Fred B. Millett papers

Fred B. Millett (1890-1976) taught at Wesleyan from 1937 until his retirement in 1958. He was director of the Honors College from 1943 until 1958. In 1952 he was named Olin Professor of English.

Professor Millett was a brilliant and gifted teacher. He cared deeply about educational reform, especially in the humanities. From 1942-1943 he was consultant to the humanities division at the Rockefeller Foundation for a study on the rebirth of liberal education. From 1952-1954 he served as president of the American Association of University Professors. In this role he pushed back against Senator Joseph McCarthy and the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee and their efforts to stifle academic freedom.

Professor Millett was born February 19, 1890 in Brockton, MA, to Daniel Edwin Millett and Mary Avalina Churchill Porter. In 1908 he was valedictorian for the graduating class of Whitman (MA) Public High School. He was orphaned during his years at Amherst College but graduated magna cum laude in 1912, a member of Phi Beta Kappa. For the next four years he was a lecturer in English at Queen’s University in Ontario, and in 1916 he began a fellowship at the University of Chicago. Drafted in 1918, he rose to the rank of second lieutenant at Officers Training School before being discharged in 1919. From 1919 to 1927 he taught at Carnegie Institute of Technology. He began as assistant professor of English and became associate professor in 1926. In 1927 he was hired as an assistant professor at the University of Chicago rising to associate professor there in 1932. While at Chicago he completed his Ph.D., (1931). He left Chicago to come to Wesleyan in 1937.

After his retirement from Wesleyan, Millett served briefly as Distinguished Professor of English at the State University of New York at Albany. Otherwise, he divided his time between his Whitman home and Cape Cod, working on his journals and maintaining his interest in all the arts, as well as some scholarly activity. He edited the eighth edition of A History of English Literature in 1964. Millett died on January 1, 1976, in Brockton, MA.