Cornelius Betten (1877-1962), Lake Forest College Class of 1900, attended Lake Forest Academy and College in the 1890s and taught here in its early "golden age" under Presdient J. S. Nollen, 1907 to 1915.  This all was a period of transition from the institutution's  aspirations to be a research university to its revised goal of being a quality liberal arts college. Betten went on to a career at Cornell University, where he did his graduate work, and then returned to teach and rose to serve as Dean of the Faculty of that University, in the 1930s and early 1940s. He also engaged in scientific research that was published.  

A specimen for the College herbarium was sent back to Lake Forest by Betten in 1904 from Cornell, while he was doing his biology graduate studies there.  This is profiled in the College's 2000-published institutional history, 30 Miles North... by Franz Schulze et al., p. 62. 

There is a lack here of good images of Betten in our Archives and reproduced here is one from the 1915 Forester yearbook, available online at http://archive.org/stream/forester18lake#page/n9/mode/2up  . The short biography and photo reproduced here is on p. 13.  The Stentor newspaper, often cited in Leffner's bibliography, also is available at archive.org: search "Lake Forest College Stentor" and the year.  

First year student intern in Archives and Special Collections Nickolai Leffner created this biographical sketch of Betten from sources in the collections and online. It grew out of focus on the herbarium in the fall of 2011, from an exhibit in which Archives material was featured.  Leffner has been accepted into the College's Richter (honors research) program for the summer of 2012.  This document is his work with only very minor editorial additions, and all approved by him.