John Semple Galbraith

For other people named John Galbraith, see John Galbraith (disambiguation).

John Semple Galbraith (died 2003) was a 20th-century British Empire historian, concentrating on Canada (The Hudson's Bay Company) and South and East Africa, and former Chancellor of the University of California, San Diego. A native of Glasgow, his family immigrated to the US in 1926. He received a BA from Miami University in Ohio in 1938, and Ph.D. in 1943 at the University of Iowa, working under his dissertation advisor, C. W. de Kiewiet. He served as an Army historical officer for the Third Air Force until 1946, and assumed a professorship at UCLA in 1948. As a condition of accepting the chancellorship from UC President Clark Kerr in 1964, he secured a promise that a library would be built and that UCSD would otherwise receive full standing as an autonomous university of the system. The Geisel Library is considered his legacy at UCSD. He left the campus for a visiting fellowship at Cambridge in 1968, and subsequently resumed teaching at UCLA.