Irvin G. Wyllie
Irvin Gordon Wyllie was an American historian and professor.
Wyllie studied at Westminster College, Oberlin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he received his PhD in 1949. He taught at the University of Maryland and University of Missouri, before returning to the University of Wisconsin, where he was the first Gordon E. Fox Professor of American Institutions, and chairman of the history department. He was a Ford fellow at Cornell, and a Fulbright lecturer at Gothenburg and Lund.
In 1966 he was appointed as the first chancellor of the newly created University of Wisconsin-Parkside, and served in that capacity until his 1974 death from a heart attack at the age of 54. The school's Wyllie Hall is named for him, and the Wyllie Society for Planned Giving was established at the University in his memory.
Personal life
Born in Pittsburgh, Wyllie married Harriet Fairley, a fellow Westminster alumnus, in 1945; she worked in Madison's public library to help him get his Ph.D., and followed him as he moved from institution to institution.He died October 25, 1974, at the age of 54 in his Kenosha County home of a heart attack, having been hospitalized the prior May from a previous attack. He was survived by his wife Harriett and three children; she died in 2011.