The American educator and biblical scholar William Rainey Harper (1856-1906) was the first president of the University of Chicago.

Born in New Concord, Ohio, on July 24, 1856, William Rainey Harper attended Muskingum College in New Concord, where his interest in Hebraic studies began. He graduated in 1870 and went on to receive a doctorate from Yale in 1874 for studies in the Indo-Iranian and Semitic languages. After teaching at Masonic College in Macon, Tenn., and then at Denison University, he moved on to a professorship in Hebrew at the Baptist Union Theological Seminary in Chicago. He held the chair of Semitic languages at Yale from 1886 to 1891, earning a national reputation as a teacher, lecturer, and writer. In 1889 he was also appointed Woolsey professor of biblical literature at Yale. He was active in the Chautauqua movement, serving as principal of the Chautauqua College of Liberal Arts from 1885 to 1891 and lecturing on biblical...