In a decade as president of Illinois Wesleyan University in Bloomington, Lloyd M. Bertholf expanded the Methodist school’s campus and boosted enrollment and the caliber of instruction, college officials said.
Long after his 1968 retirement, the entomologist-turned-administrator remained a steadying presence at campus events, lucidly telling faculty and students about his life spanning three centuries–and delivering expository speeches on the curious life of bees.
Mr. Bertholf, 103, died Monday, Jan. 20, in a nursing home in Normal.
“From 1958 to 1968 he really transformed the nature of the place,” said Minor Myers Jr., Illinois Wesleyan’s 17th, and current, president. “He hired more faculty, added new buildings, increased the number of students and began finding more interesting faculty. He was the one who really changed the vector of where it was and where it was headed.”
The transformation of the college–which opened with one instructor and seven students in 1850 and at one point advertised itself as the University of Illinois–under Mr. Bertholf, its 14th leader, made a major impact on its Downstate community, Myers said.
Enrollment grew to about 1,500 students from 1,148 and the number of faculty members went to 109 from 75. Perhaps even more important during those 10 years, Myers said, was the addition of 10 buildings, including academic buildings and residence halls, and the creation of a nursing school.
History professor Paul Bushnell lauded Mr. Bertholf’s talent for balancing a changing the relationship between the college and the church, all during a turbulent time for the nation.
“The college struggled through the [Vietnam] war,” said Bushnell, who was appointed in 1966. “He came at a not-easy time, weaning us from the strict Methodist tradition where bishops had played a much larger role.
“But he was very humane and congenial, a real academic leader not cut out of the mold. As a historian, I wasn’t too prepared to study the books on bees, though,” referring to Mr. Bertholf’s habit of peppering long talks with tidbits about the physiology and behavior of bees.
The subject was a natural for Mr. Bertholf, who was born to farmers of oats, corn and cattle in Wichita, Kan., said his daughter, Lynn B. Westcot.
He received a bachelor’s degree in biology from Southwestern College in Winfield, Kan., and a master’s in biology and doctorate in entomology from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, all by the mid-1920s. In the early 1930s he worked with Nobel Prize-winning zoologist Karl von Frisch–renowned for his work on how insects communicate–at the University of Munich in Germany.
After a couple years of teaching biology at North Carolina Women’s College in Greensboro, he was a biology professor and later faculty dean of Western Maryland University between 1924 and 1948. He then was a professor of zoology, dean and academic vice president of the College of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif., until he was named to lead Illinois Wesleyan.
Mr. Bertholf is also survived by his son, Max, six grandchildren; and eight great-grandchildren. Services have been held.
