Designed Princeton’s women’s admission program

William Bowen, an economist who helped design the program that admitted women to Princeton University and who later served as university president for 15 years and became one of the country’s most influential thinkers about affirmative action and the role of higher education, died Oct. 20 at his home in Princeton, N.J. He was 83.

The cause was colon cancer, the university said.

Bowen joined the Princeton faculty in the 1950s.

As the university’s pro- vost in the late 1960s, in charge of academic and budgetary matters, he was a principal architect of plans to introduce coeducation to the previously all-male Ivy League campus. Women began to join the Princeton student body in 1969.

“When we studied coeducation from every imaginable angle, we parsed out its costs and its consequences,” Bowen told the Daily Princetonian in 2011. “Once the decision was made, we acted instantly. There were a lot of reasons why that was important. I was confident that it would be the women students themselves who would sell coeducation to any doubting alumni and others. And they did.”

In1972, when Bowen was 38, he was named president of the university, the nation’s fourth-oldest institution of higher learning. Two women who entered Princeton during his tenure, Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, are now Supreme Court justices.

As president, Bowen opened other doors at Princeton as well. In an effort to reduce the influence of exclusive, all-male “eating clubs” that had dominated campus social life for decades, he introduced a system of residential colleges for undergraduates.

He led a fundraising campaign that added $410 million to the university’s endowment.

He approved expansions to the college library and art museum and increased the size of the faculty by more than 60 percent, with an emphasis on hiring women and minorities.

After stepping down from the Princeton presidency in January1988, Bowen became president of the New York-based Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, which supports educational and cultural initiatives. He continued to cultivate a reputation for innovative thinking about education and published several books, including the influential “The Shape of the River: Long-Term Consequences of Considering Race in College and University Admission” (1998), written with former Harvard president Derek Bok.

Survivors include his wife of 60 years, the former Mary Ellen Maxwell of Princeton; two children, David Bowen of Scarsdale, N.Y., and Karen BowenIm hof of Antwerp, Belgium; and five grandchildren.