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Thomas McClelland was Pacific University's fourth president, serving from 1892-1900. Born in 1849 in County Derry, Ireland, he immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of three. He earned an A.B. at Oberlin College in Ohio in 1875, and then attended Union Theological Seminary in New York and Andover Theological Seminary in Massachussetts. He then taught philosophy for 11 years at Tabor College in Iowa.

When McClelland became Pacific University's president in 1892, he stepped into a tense political atmosphere. The previous president, Jacob Ellis, had resigned over the issue of sectarian control of the university. Ellis, along with one half of the Board of Trustees, favored bringing Pacific under the formal control of the Congregationalist denomination. The other half of the Board of Trustees wanted Pacific to remain non-denominational. McClelland's task was to heal the fractures between the two parties. He fashioned a compromise, amending the charter to give a two-thirds majority of the Board to the Congregationalists, without putting the school under the denomination's direct control. This solution allowed Pacific to retain a special relationship with the Congregationalist Church, while staying a non-sectarian school.

Student life at Pacific evolved considerably during McClelland's presidency. The football team played its first game in 1893. Men's baseball, basketball and track also began early in the decade; women's basketball and track began in 1899. Extracurricular clubs centered on debate, music, drama, archery and the YMCA/YWCA flourished. The Index, the student newspaper, was established in 1893r; The Heart of Oak, the student yearbook, was first issued a year later. McClelland raised funds to construct Marsh Memorial Hall, which became the center of campus administration. He also helped to recruit two influential faculty members, Henry Liberty Bates and Mary Frances Farnham, and oversaw Pacific's 50th anniversary celebrations. Student enrollment in the university doubled during his term.

The constant need to raise money for the university took its toll on McClelland however. He often travelled for months at a time to locations across the United States, looking for sources of funding. When he resigned in 1900, he explained, "I had begun to feel the strain of the constant canvass for money at such a great distance from home and I was keenly sensible to the dact that under the circumstances I could not do for the institution all that, in my judgment, a president should do for a college," (Letter to Myron Eells, 10 Jan 1901). On leaving Pacific, he took a new position as the president of Knox College in Illinois, where he remained for 17 years. He continued to advocate for Pacific University even after leaving. As a member of the board of directors of the Carnegie Foundation, he very likely had a hand in securing its funds for a new dormitory and a library at Pacific University, which were built in 1907 and 1912.

Most of the biographical information above has been adapted from Splendid Audacity: The Story of Pacific University (Gary Miranda and Rick Read, 2000).