Goodrich, Leland M.

Leland Matthew Goodrich (1899-1990), professor of political science, was born in Lewiston, Maine, on September 1, 1899. As a boy, he attended town meetings in Maine, which aroused his interest in politics and government. He graduated from Bowdoin College in 1920 and earned his master of arts degree in 1921 and his Ph.D. in 1925, both from Harvard. While studying for his doctorate he taught at Brown in 1922-23, and during the next two years studied in Brussels, Paris, and the Hague on a fellowship of the Commission for the Relief of Belgium. He taught at Lafayette College in 1925-26 and returned to Brown as assistant professor of political science in 1926. He was named associate professor in 1931 and professor in 1946. He was a lecturer at the Naval War College from 1928 to 1939. He studied in Geneva during a leave of absence in 1936 and during World War II was on leave to be director of the World Peace Foundation in Boston from 1942 to 1946. He was a member of the international secretariat for the United Nations Conference on International Organization in San Francisco in 1945. He took a leave of absence in 1948 and was appointed chairman of the Political Science Department in 1949. When he left Brown on 1950 to become professor of international organization and American foreign relations at Columbia University School of International Affairs, where he had been a visiting professor for two years, President Wriston approved the appointment, which “taking him as it does near the United Nations headquarters, will allow him to continue his distinguished work with that organization in the field of foreign affairs.” His book, The United Nations, was one of seventy “controversial” volumes removed from a United States exhibition in Moscow in 1959, and was later one of 37 of these books allowed to be returned to the exhibit. He was also the author of The United Nations in a Changing World in 1974. He died on November 16, 1990.