At a meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on May 5, 2026, the following tribute to the life and service of the late Dennis Frank Thompson was spread upon the permanent records of the Faculty.
Born: May 12, 1940Died: March 30, 2025
Dennis Frank Thompson once described the early days of the program he founded at Harvard as the work of “a peripatetic Director” on “a quixotic undertaking.” The skeptics, he noted, fell into two camps: “Some critics complained that we were teaching people to be ethical, which they assumed is impossible, especially at Harvard. Other critics complained that we were not teaching people to be ethical, which they assumed is irresponsible, especially at Harvard.” He could hold both objections in view, find humor in each, and build an institution that outlasted them both.
Dennis was born on May 12, 1940, in Hamilton, Ohio, to Frank and Florence Thompson. He was the first in his family to attend college. He graduated summa cum laude from the College of William and Mary in 1962, then crossed the Atlantic as a Fulbright Scholar to Balliol College, Oxford, where he earned a First in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. He completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Government at Harvard in 1968.
