Herbert Warren Richardson

Herbert Warren Richardson (born April 14, 1932) is an American professor of theology, an ordained Presbyterian minister, and the founder of the Edwin Mellen Press, which describes itself as "a non-subsidy academic publisher of books in the humanities and social sciences."

Early life

Herbert Warren Richardson was born in 1932. Richardson is the great-grandson of Isaac Adams, a Massachusetts State Senator and the inventor of the Adams Power Press. He attended Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, Ohio and pledged an interracial fraternity, where his friends included James Lawson, the activist and an architect of the civil rights movement. In 1963, Richardson earned his doctorate at the Harvard Divinity School.

Career

Academia After receiving his doctorate, Richardson became an assistant professor at the Harvard Divinity School, where he was the first professor appointed to the HDS faculty who was trained by it. In the late 1960s, he left Harvard for the University of St. Michael's College. In 1981 he edited a book defending Sun Myung Moon and the Unification Church; this became an official text of that church.

In 1994, Richardson was fired by St. Michael's on the grounds that he had abused a medical leave and not fully disclosed the amount of time he was spending on a business venture, the Edwin Mellen Press.

Subsequently, as the University suspended accreditation of his courses in 1993 while the investigation continued, Richardson founded the Edwin Mellen University. Located in the Turks and Caicos, this business offered M.Phil. and D.Litt. degrees based on dissertations alone, and Baccaloreat degrees for life experience.

In 1994, the University of Toronto concluded that Richardson was a "dishonest and untrustworthy employee" who made "substantial financial gain" from running his two businesses, and sacked him. In the 1990s, Richardson brought a similar suit against the magazine Lingua Franca for its coverage critical of the company. The returned documents did not include pages from the diary of Alfred Rosenberg, a chief aide of Hitler, which been held by Robert Kempner until his death in 1993 at age 93. In 2013, Richardson was again contacted by investigators searching for the diary pages, which were found to be in his possession. The diary was recovered by U.S. ICE agents in June 2013 and is now in the possession of the Holocaust Museum.