Professor of Modern History
Centurion, 1900–1933
Born 25 March 1859 in New York (Brooklyn), New York
Died 30 August 1933 in Washington, Connecticut
Buried Princeton Cemetery
, Princeton, New Jersey
Proposed by Arthur H. Scribner and George Alexander
Elected 7 April 1900 at age forty-one
Archivist’s Note: Brother of Henry van Dyke
Seconder of:
Century Memorial
Every one who knew Paul Van Dyke will remember first of all his unfailing friendliness, accompanied with the touch of dignity that was natural to him. Invariably good-humored and not in the least self-conscious, it was his personality quite as much as his literary and historical scholarship which made impression. But his qualities as a scholar were out of the ordinary. He was by instinct not only thorough in his methods, but surprisingly impartial in conclusions. That a writer with Van Dyke’s social antecedents should have entered thus sympathetically into the spirit of the French Renaissance was sufficiently interesting. But that he, a Calvinist clergyman, should have received from a Roman Catholic university its doctorate degree for his life of Ignatius Loyola, was in all respects unusual.
Alexander Dana Noyes
1934 Century Association Yearbook