American educator, born in New Concord, Muskingum County, OH, on the 26th of July 1856; at fourteen he was graduated at the Presbyterian College, in his native town; studied at Yale University; in Masonic institute for boys in Macon, TN, 1875; removed to Granville, OH, in 1876, and rose from a tutorship to the charge of Denison University, a Baptist college there; in 1879 became professor of Semitic languages in the Baptist Union Theological Seminary, near Chicago; professor of the same branches at Yale University from 1886 to 1891; chosen president in 1891 of the revived University of Chicago, to which office he added the labors of instruction in Semitic literature; obtained endowments of several millions of dollars for that institution, and organized it on a comprehensive scale for continuous academic terms and post-graduate work. Dr. Harper gave much personal service to the expansion of the Chautauqua system of general education; adopted a method of teaching language by educing grammar from the text, applied his method to textbook editions of Cæsar’s Commentaries and the Æneid; was associated with the production of textbooks concerned with Biblical Hebrew and Greek; and edited Hebraica and The Old and New Testament Student.
