John Huston Finley

John Huston Finley (October 19, 1863 – March 7, 1940) was Professor of Polities at Princeton University from 1900 to 1903, and President of the City College of New York from 1903 until 1913, when he was appointed Commissioner of Education of the State of New York.Commissioner of Education of the State of New York also comes with the title President of the University of the State of New York. The one job has two title. A promenade along the western bank of the East River between 63rd Street and 125th Street in Manhattan was named the John Finley Walk in 1940 because he had often walked the perimeter of Manhattan.

Biography

He was born in Grand Ridge, Illinois, the eldest son of James Gibson Finley and Lydia Margaret McCombs. His father and mother went out as early settlers on the prairies from the East. His father was the great-grandson of the Rev. James Finley, the first minister, it is believed, to settle permanently beyond the Allegheny Mountains in Western Pennsylvania, and brother of Dr. Samuel Finley, President of Princeton College in the middle of the eighteenth century. Mr. Finley’s brother, Robert, who died in his early thirties, was associate editor of the Review of Reviews; his sister, Bertha, died as a missionary in Korea.

Finley was educated in the public schools of Grand Ridge, the Ottawa High School, and Knox College, Galesburg, Illinois, receiving the degree of A.B. and A.M., and afterward took up post-graduate work at the......
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