Skotheim to Direct Huntington Complex

Robert Skotheim, president of Whitman College, has been named director of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. A specialist in American intellectual history, Skotheim will begin his new position July 1. He succeeds Robert Middlekauff, who resigned last year to teach history at UC Berkeley.

Skotheim will arrive in Southern California after 13 years at Whitman, a private liberal arts and sciences college in Walla Walla, Wash. He has served the institution as an administrator, history professor and fund-raiser. Prior to his post at Whitman, Skotheim was provost and dean of faculty at Hobart and William Smith Colleges in Geneva, N.Y.

A recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship, Skotheim is well known in his field as the author of “American Intellectual Histories and Historians,” published in 1966 and republished in 1978.

He was born in Seattle and educated at the University of Washington, where he earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees.

In a prepared statement, Skotheim praised the Huntington as “a unique institution in the Anglo-American world” and said he is “excited to participate in its affairs.”