Peter Likins
American academic administrator
Peter William Likins (born July 4, 1936) is a retired American professor and academic. He was president of Lehigh University from 1982 to 1997 and the University of Arizona from 1997 until his retirement in summer 2006.
Biography
Likins graduated from Santa Cruz High School in 1953, where he was captain of the wrestling team and co-captain of the football team. He attended Stanford University as an undergraduate, studying civil engineering and became a member of Delta Tau Delta International Fraternity. He earned a master's from MIT and a PhD from Stanford.
He was a faculty member at UCLA from 1964 until 1976. Likins was the dean of Columbia's engineering school from 1976 to 1980 and provost of the university for professional schools from 1980 to 1981.
President of Lehigh University
He was president of Lehigh University from 1982 to 1997. Likins was elected a member of the National Academy of Engineering (1984) for contributions to spacecraft dynamics and control, and for leadership in engineering education through teaching, research, writing, and academic administration. While serving as President of Lehigh, first year student Jeanne Clery was raped and murdered.
“Peter Likins” enters the record as american academic administrator. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Peter, Likins and American can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Named sources, stable identifiers and responsible institutions provide the strongest route from overview to verifiable evidence. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16104491. VIAF identifies the subject as 51771237. The Library of Congress control number is n81054185. None of the 3 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1936, 1982, 1997 and 2006.
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This entry incorporates text from “Peter Likins” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.