While serving as president of Amherst College, Peter Pouncey wrote scores of pages he later trimmed down to his only novel.
In “Rules for Old Men Waiting,” the protagonist and his Cape Cod cottage seem locked in a race to see which will fall apart first. “First lines of novels are not always telling,” Globe book critic Gail Caldwell wrote in 2005, “but this one is: ‘The house and the old man were well matched, both large framed and failing fast.’ "
Although the fictional 80-year-old Robert MacIver had been a professor, the book wasn’t autobiographical. Along with teaching, Dr. Pouncey spent much of his academic career as an administrator, first as the youngest dean in Columbia University’s history and then as the 16th president of Amherst College.
He pushed for change at each institution, bucking Columbia superiors as he advocated for coeducation and granted official designation to what was believed to be the first lounge in the nation for gay students. During his Amherst tenure, the college established the department of women’s and gender studies.
Dr. Pouncey, who studied to become a Jesuit before deciding to be a classics professor, died of complications from vascular dementia May 30 in a nursing home in Canaan, Conn. He was 85 and had returned to Columbia and New York City a few years after he served as president at Amherst from 1984 to 1994.
“He was a true scholar who led with hope and ambition,” said Michael A. Elliott, Amherst’s current president, for the college’s tribute.
“I had the chance to speak with him several times during my undergraduate career,” said Elliott, who graduated while Dr. Pouncey was president, “and he was always gracious and kind.”
When Dr. Pouncey was appointed dean at Columbia in March 1972, he was 34 and had not yet been granted tenure. A child of British parents, he was the university’s first dean since the Revolutionary War who wasn’t a US citizen.
By taking a top administrative post amid student upheaval during the Vietnam War, he immediately became a protest target. “I was the cannon fodder dean,” he told The New York Times years later.
At Amherst, among his first duties was fostering an engaging campus life. The college’s trustees had previously voted to abolish the fraternity system, which took effect when he became president.
While presiding over an expansion of facilities and efforts to increase student and faculty diversity, he was known for his wit and an ability to poke fun at himself. Fond of nicknames, Dr. Pouncey chose “Pounce Dog” for himself.
He also was wary of electronic devices. A student publication reported in 1993 that “he would not answer more than three pieces of e-mail a week.” A 2005 New York Times profile noted that he didn’t have a cellphone and still hadn’t made his peace with computers.
“They really do smell fear,” he said.
The youngest of three siblings, Peter R. Pouncey was born on Oct. 1, 1937, in Tsingtao, China.
His father, Cecil Pouncey, spoke several Chinese dialects and was England’s commissioner of Chinese customs until the Communist revolution.
During World War II, Dr. Pouncey lived with his mother — Eugenie Marjorie Lintilhac Pouncey, who was known as Marty — in Vancouver, British Columbia, while his father remained in China.
Born in Shanghai, his mother was half-British, half-French, and a daughter of silk merchants.
The Pouncey family lived in England after the war, and Dr. Pouncey graduated with undergraduate and graduate degrees from Oxford University.
His interest in becoming a Jesuit faded and he went to the United States for a one-year job filling in for a Fordham University professor on leave.
“I liked it so much that I have remained in America since then,” he told the Associated Press in 1983, when Amherst announced he would become president the following year.
Dr. Pouncey joined Columbia’s faculty in the late 1960s, received a doctorate there, and was so well-liked that when he was named dean, a student told him: “I hope they won’t make you into an ogre now.”
“No,” he replied. “I will be the milk of human kindness all the time.”
In 1980, Dr. Pouncey published “The Necessities of War: A Study of Thucydides’ Pessimism,” which won the 1981 Lionel Trilling Award for Columbia’s best scholarly publication.
“My main man is Thucydides,” he said in the 2005 Times interview of the fifth-century Athenian historian.
In “Rules for Old Men Waiting,” historian Robert MacIver kept writing amid life’s burdens. As his health ebbed and he waited to die, his rules included: “Work every morning. Nap in afternoon if needed.”
Dr. Pouncey was always writing, too. He returned to teaching at Amherst, post-presidency, and at the end of the 1990s he rejoined the faculty at Columbia, where he was part of the Society of Senior Scholars.
“Like the fine single-malt Scotch MacIver drinks, Pouncey’s book was decades in the making — which may account for the confidence of his prose and the bold, sure strokes with which his strong-willed main character is drawn,” wrote Maggie Galehouse in the Times about “Rules for Old Men.”
Dr. Pouncey’s daughter, Maggie Pouncey of Rhinebeck, N.Y., who also is a writer, has notebooks and manuscripts he left behind from his years working on another novel and a memoir in verse and prose.
“I think he was a true original. He was extremely playful with language,” she said. “There are so many phrases I use with my family and my kids that were his own invention.”
She added that her father “was extremely generous. He had this boyish love of Christmas and birthdays and gift-giving. He was a serious scholar, but he had this real warmth of spirit.”
Dr. Pouncey, whose three marriages ended in divorce, also leaves a son, Christian of Charlottesville, Va.; a stepdaughter, Emily Liebert of Cleveland; a sister, Jane Orme of England; and five grandchildren.
A memorial service at Amherst College will be announced.
As “Rules for Old Men Waiting” opens, the protagonist is grieving the death of his wife.
“Bereavement seemed to work on him as a kind of blanket allergy, making him edgy and irritable to all the outside world,” Dr. Pouncey wrote. “And of course it was reciprocal: the world receded on him.”
What’s left “is the sensibility of an abundant inner life that defines ‘Rules for Old Men Waiting,’ so rich and reasoned and full-blown that only time could have produced it,” Caldwell wrote in her Globe review.
In the more than two decades he took to write the novel, Dr. Pouncey produced more than 1,000 pages, which he trimmed to about 240.
“Pouncey has pruned this down to a fare-thee-well,” a bookseller told the Times in 2005, when the novel was named an editor’s choice.
Even then, though more years of writing lay ahead, Dr. Pouncey knew time wasn’t limitless, knowledge his protagonist shared.
“MacIver is in the position I want to be in at the end,” he told the Times.
“There is a clock running on you, and not the clock of mortality but the thought that there is an unknown date when you may lose your marbles, when you can’t focus, you can’t write, you can’t pull together complex thoughts,” Dr. Pouncey said. “That perception is strong for MacIver and me.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.