Chauncey G. Olinger, Jr.
Honorary Trustee; Past President (2006-17)
Chauncey G. Olinger, Jr. served as president of the National Institute (2006-2017) and is currently an honorary trustee. He is the chairman of the Margaret Mead Monument Project and founder and co-chairman of the Columbia University Seminar on the History of Columbia University.
Mr. Olinger was an NROTC scholarship midshipman at the University of Virginia, graduating from an Oxford-style tutorial program with honors in philosophy (1955). He served for three years as an ensign and a lieutenant (junior grade) deck and watch officer aboard the battleship U.S.S. Iowa in the Atlantic and Mediterranean.
Following his naval service, Mr. Olinger studied philosophy at Columbia University’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, where his fellow students elected him the presiding officer of the Graduate Students Philosophy Club, the Graduate Faculties Student Council, and the Columbia University Student Council. In this last role, he led the successful effort to persuade New York City to replace the dangerous horse-and-buggy-era subway kiosk at 116th Street and Broadway with safer sidewalk entrances, among other accomplishments. Subsequently, he served as president of the Graduate Faculties Alumni association, founded the I. I. Rabi Memorial Room in the university’s Pupin Hall, and conducted oral history interviews of Stringfellow Barr, Courtney C. Brown, Grayson L. Kirk, and I. I. Rabi.
He was resident manager of Bard Hall at the Columbia Presbyterian Medical Center (1964-1966), taught philosophy at Rutgers University for three years, served on the staff of the State Department’s Advisory Committee for the first United Nations Conference on the Human Environment (1972), and was the NGO representative for Friends of the Earth at the United Nations. In collaboration with Friends of the Earth, he organized and chaired the national Coalition to Stop SST (Concorde) Environmental Damage (1975-1978).
For a decade, Mr. Olinger was the consulting editor of the Program for Studies of the Modern Corporation at Columbia Business School, where he edited books by Courtney C. Brown, Neil H. Jacoby, Seymour Martin Lipset, among others. He headed the Metropolitan Research Company, where he was the editor of Margaret Mead’s last major work, World Enough: Rethinking the Future (1975), a collaboration with the photographer Ken Heyman. He then worked as a stockbroker and certified financial planner at the New York office of Philadelphia-based Janney Montgomery Scott LLC.
As a volunteer, he has been president of several organizations, including the Laymen’s Club of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and the Church Club of New York (Episcopal). Mr. Olinger is the son of a mother from a southeastern Virginia family and a career naval officer from Missouri. He is married to Carla Dragan Olinger from Ohio, a graduate of Douglas College, who had a career as a medical writer.