John Watts, Longtime Member of the Hampshire Board of Trustees, Passes Away
For a total of 16 years, the civic leader and business professional John Watts volunteered for the College. He died on January 13.
Watts served as a trustee from October 1975 to May 1991, the last four of those years as Board Chair. He was named Trustee Emeritus on May 10, 1991.
A Texas native, Watts relocated to Brooklyn after attending Harvard Business School, and worked as a partner in a global fixed-income investment management firm. He lectured at the Salzburg Seminar and served on the boards of the Salzburg Seminar, Robert College (in Istanbul), and the World Policy Institute.
Watts’s commitment to the environment was an outgrowth of his love of the sea as a former Navy reserve officer and avid boater and his formative love of the Texas Hill Country. He was a founding member and chair of the Brooklyn Bridge Park Coalition (now Conservancy), treasurer for the National Park Foundation, chair of the board of the Waterfront Alliance, and on the board of the League of Conservation Voters Alliance.
For his obituary in The New York Times, his family wrote that “John was a passionate advocate for Hampshire College.”
Article Tags
