Commencement 2004: Honorands
Donald McMillan Routh, Class of 1958
Doctor of Humane Letters
As one of the architects of Amherst’s exemplary financial aid system,
Donald McMillan “Skip” Routh has devoted his professional career
to developing and maintaining the principles of need-based financial aid in American
colleges. Under this system, those who are intellectually qualified can attend
college without regard to economic circumstances.
A 1958 graduate of Amherst, with a master’s in teaching from Johns Hopkins,
Routh served as Amherst’s dean of financial aid from 1964 to 1981. He then
served in the same capacity at Yale, retiring in 2000.
A thoughtful and quietly influential presence in his professional life and in
civic life, he served on the town’s Board of Selectmen and chaired Amherst’s
Landlord Tenant Relations Committee; he also has been a
member of several volunteer boards in his home state of Connecticut. His service
to Amherst extended beyond his job: as an alumni volunteer, he served for twenty
years as a class agent.
Nationally, Routh has been chairman of the College Scholarship Service Council
and chair of the Policy Committee of the Consortium on Financing Higher Education.
In both groups, he worked to create and maintain an ethos in which need-based
financial aid could be paired with need-blind admission.
An advocate for students, he has a depth of vision that has allowed him to see
that what might, in the short haul, be best for some might not, in the long haul,
be best for most. He has been deeply, but not uncritically, loyal to the schools
he has served, often reminding those institutions
of their responsibility to the larger society. Skip Routh has been an educator,
in the surest sense of the word.
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Photo: Michael Zide