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Winton Henry Beaven '37

Jan. 26, 1915-May. 12, 2003

Winton Henry Beaven ’37, a former college president whose career as an educator and academic administrator spanned 60 years, was born on January 26, 1915, in Binghamton, NY. A son of William H., a high school teacher, and Eva Longway Beaven, he grew up in the Camden area, northeast of Syracuse, and enrolled at Hamilton as a scholarship student from Camden High School in 1933. During his two years on the Hill he participated in intercollegiate debate. In 1935, his scholarship having run out because of the Depression, he transferred to Atlantic Union College in Massachusetts, where he was able to earn enough money working part-time to complete his studies and obtain his A.B. degree Phi Beta Kappa in 1937.

After acquiring an M.A. in history from Clark University in 1938, Winton Beaven began his career as an instructor at Madison College in Tennessee, where he also served as dean of men. He returned to Atlantic Union as an instructor in English and speech in 1940, but left again three years later when appointed chairman of the department of speech and assistant to the president of Union College in Nebraska. After obtaining his Ph.D. in speech from the University of Michigan in 1950, he stayed on there as an assistant professor until 1953. He subsequently served for three years as education director of the International Commission for the Prevention of Alcoholism.

In 1959, after serving concurrently as professor of communications at the Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary and dean of the graduate school at Potomac University in Washington, DC, Dr. Beaven was appointed professor of speech and dean of academic administration at Columbia Union College in Maryland. Named president in 1965, he headed the college until 1970, when he became academic dean and chief operating officer of Kettering College of Medical Arts in Ohio. He simultaneously served as vice president of education of the affiliated Kettering Medical Center until his retirement in 1983.

However, Dr. Beaven stayed on as assistant to the president of the Medical Center, in charge of special projects, until 1997. A past president of both the International Committee and the National Committee for the Prevention of Alcoholism, he also continued until 1998 as special assistant to the president of the General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, providing educational leadership in substance abuse prevention. Through the years, his organizational and lecture activities in that field took him to more than 70 countries around the world, and in 1972, as presiding officer, he delivered the keynote address at the First International Congress on the Prevention of Alcoholism and Substance Abuse, held in Kabul, Afghanistan.

A dedicated educator, Winton Beaven was known as a “renaissance man,” commanding many and diverse areas of expertise. They included management training and stress management, on which he was a consultant in the 1940s, long before it became a popular concept. At that time he also experimented with distance learning, decades before it was widely embraced in the field of education. An ordained minister of the Seventh-day Adventist Church and a committed Christian, he engaged in a great variety of humanitarian undertakings as well.

Winton H. Beaven, a resident of Kettering, OH, died on May 12, 2003, at a hospice in nearby Dayton. He is survived by his wife, the former Lorraine Smith, whom he had married in 1969, and their daughter, Lara Beaven. Also surviving are three sons and two daughters, M. Eric, Marc J., and Barry J. Beaven, and Barbara Abrahamian and Connie Petrie, by Dr. Beaven’s first marriage, in 1938, to Barbara V. Hallifax, as well as 17 grandchildren and 14 great-grandchildren.

 

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