John Harvey Saunders

Before moving to LaGrange in 1992, Dr. Saunders was the president of Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, for fifteen years. To date he is the second longest serving president in the college’s 165 year history.

Westminster was founded in 1851 as a Presbyterian college for men. As president, Dr. Saunders instituted co-education in 1979, and is also credited with strengthening the college’s liberal arts curriculum as well as substantially increasing its endowment.

Westminster was also the venue, in 1946, for Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech, which warned the United States about Soviet attempts to create a communist sphere in Eastern Europe. The college had built a museum and memorial to Churchill on its campus in 1969. When Cold War tensions increased in the 1980s, Dr. Saunders drew on the connection with Churchill and his speech to invite a number of prominent world leaders to speak at Westminster.

Among the dignitaries Dr. Saunders and his wife, Eve, entertained at the college were Presidents Ford, Reagan and George H.W. Bush, British Prime Minister Edward Heath, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger, CIA Director William Casey, as well as a number of prominent diplomats and scholars.

Before leaving Westminster in 1992, Dr. Saunders invited former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to visit and proclaim the end of the Cold War. Gorbachev’s speech brought thousands of visitors to the campus and national attention to the college. A section of the Berlin Wall, dedicated by President Reagan in 1991 and sculpted into a monument by Churchill’s granddaughter, stands today on the campus alongside the Churchill museum.

Dr. Saunders was also the dean of Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi from 1971-1977, the Associate Dean and Acting Dean of Arts and Sciences at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia from 1969-1971, and a professor of History at Marshall, where he received his B.A. in History and Education in 1962. Dr. Saunders was also awarded an M.A. in History from Stetson College in DeLand, Florida in 1963, and his Ph.D. in History from the University of Georgia in 1965. He is a 1976 graduate of Harvard University’s Institute for Educational Management (IEM) which at that point was under the direction of the Harvard Business School.

Dr. Saunders met his wife, Eve McClatchey, at the University of Georgia. They were married in 1965 and recently celebrated their fiftieth wedding anniversary in Atlanta. Dr. Saunders was a member of the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity, which honored him for outstanding contributions to Education and Religion in 1987. He was trained as a concert pianist, and also enjoyed horseback riding, collecting antiques, contract bridge, opera, reading and writing short stories.

Dr. Saunders is survived by his wife, the former Eve McClatchey of Atlanta, a brother, a son, daughter and son-in-law, and three grandchildren.

A funeral service will be held at St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Roanoke, Alabama on Tuesday, May 31st at 11 a.m. eastern time. The family will host a visitation and brunch reception at the church at 10 a.m. Burial will be at a private ceremony in Atlanta’s Oakland cemetery.

In lieu of flowers the family would be grateful for any memorials in Dr. Saunders’ name to the Arthritis Foundation of Georgia.