Obituary for Riverda H. Jordan
The Ithaca Journal, Sep 13 1950, P. 5, Col. 1, with photo
'Dr. Riverda Harding Jordan of Highland Lakes, Avon Park, Fla., professor of education at Cornell from 1921 to 1941, died Monday night, Sept. 11, 1950, of a heart ailment at the hospital in Atlantic City, N.J. He was 77.
His wife, Mrs. Mary V. Hoover Jordan, and a son, Richard H., of Sea Cliff, survive.
Dr. Jordan was director of the Cornell Summer Session from 1924 to 1934. He served as a director of Cornell United Religious Work from 1922 to 1935, and was president in 1935.
A native of St. Joseph, Mo., Dr. Jordan took his B.A. degree at Yale in 1893 and his M.A. there in 1913. He completed his doctorate at the University of Minnesota in 1919, and the same year received an honorary M.A. degree from Dartmouth.
He was a high school teacher and administrator the first 20 years of his professional life. Athletics took first place in his interest while he was in secondary school work, with publications and dramatics close behind. He joined the faculty of the University of Minnesota in 1917 as instructor in rhetoric and education. From 1919 until he came to Cornell in 1921, Dr. Jordan was professor of education and chairman of the department at Dartmouth. After his retirement at Cornell in 1941, he went as visiting professor to the University of Tampa, Fla., for a 2-year period.
Dr. Jordan made a conspicuous contribution to the study of college fraternities with emphasis on matters of scholarship and the use of college tutors. His report in 1932 on chapter house tutors was widely reprinted. Two years earlier he made to Phi Gamma Delta fraternity a report on scholarship that was distributed by the National Interfraternity Conference to all presidents and deans of colleges and universities in the United States. At Cornell he was faculty sponsor and secretary of the board of directors of Phi Gamma Delta, faculty sponsor for 4 years of Phi Delta Kappa, national education research fraternity, and one of three faculty members chosen by the fraternities to work with the Cornell Interfraternity Council.
He served on the scholarship committee and as chairman of the committee on chapter house tutors for the National interfraternity Council. He founded and was the first national president of Kappa Phi Kappa, and was a national councilor.
He was a member of the Ithaca Rotary Club from 1935 to 1941. When he moved to Florida, Dr. Jordan remained active as a Rotarian, and was president of the Avon Park club in 1944-45. He was a director of the Avon Park Chamber of Commerce and its president in 1947-48. He was a national councilor of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. He had been since 1948 a member of the county draft board there. He was chairman of the committee on cultural relations of the Florida Inter-American Center.
Dr. Jordan held membership in many professional societies. He was secretary in 1927 and president in 1931 of the National Association of Summer Session directors; vice president in 1929 and later chairman of the executive committee of the National Association of Colleges and Departments of Education.
He served on the New York City School Survey Committee in 1924-25, and on a similar committee in Youngstown, Ohio, in 1932.
Golf, hunting and fishing were his three major hobbies.
Books by Dr. Jordan include "Education as a Life Work," 1930; "Junior High School Course of Study," 1930; "Manual on How to Study," 1929; revised in 1932; "Extra - classroom Activities," 1928, and "Educational Measurements and the Classroom Teacher," with A. R. Gilliland in 1924, revised edition with Prof. F. S. Freeman of Cornell in 1931; "Nationality and School Progress,"1921.'