John Summerskill left his position as Vice President for Student Affairs at Cornell University to become SF State's seventh president.

Summerskill's presidency was marked by the tumultuous changes of the sixties, beginning with student protests at his inauguration ceremony in September 1966. Pressed by conflicting demands from conservatives and radicals, Summerskill announced in February 1968 that he would be leaving the college. In May 1968, during a series of campus disruptions, his earlier resignation was accepted, and he left for Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, as a member of a Ford Foundation project.

"President Seven," Summerskill's book about his brief tenure during the campus unrest at San Francisco State College during the sixties, was published in 1971.

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Archived Information. Last modified March 20, 2009, by University Communications