Philip Weltner was an attorney and academic leader who spent nearly nine decades effecting social, judicial, and educational reform. A onetime president of Oglethorpe University and chancellor for the University System of Georgia, Weltner also helped create the Board of Regents.
Philip Robert Weltner was born on July 18, 1887, in New York City to pharmacist Henry Meyer and Augusta Ruprecht, both German-born émigrés. He was the youngest of three children. His father died when he was a small child, and Weltner later took the name of his mother’s second husband, Lutheran minister Charles E. Weltner. The family moved to Augusta in 1893.
Weltner graduated from the University of Georgia in 1907, returned to New York City to study at the Columbia University Law School, and passed the bar in 1910. Weltner then moved to Atlanta, where he led the Prison Association of Georgia, an assistance organization for former inmates. The second assignment of the fledgling association was to organize the recently established Children’s Court of Fulton County, created to deal with juvenile offenders. Weltner was chosen as the inaugural chief probation officer of the juvenile system.
In 1912 Weltner became the subject of local and national interest when he joined a Campbell County chain gang under an assumed identity. Though he spent less than twenty-four hours in the company of inmates, Weltner left the experience convinced that reform was necessary. The following year, he helped write laws that established a probationary system for adult offenders and a training school for female convicted criminals. He was then made chief probation officer of Fulton County. In this role, Weltner helped close Atlanta’s “red light district” and assisted in rehabilitating women from the brothels.
Weltner married Sally Cobb Hull in 1913. The couple had five children; their youngest, Charles, represented Georgia in the U.S. Congress and served as chief justice of the state supreme court. To support his growing family, Weltner accepted a position with noted criminal attorney John A. Boykin and taught at the Atlanta College of Law. Clients too destitute for Boykin were transferred to Weltner, who quickly gained a reputation for helping the poor and powerless.
In 1918, based on his social service and legal expertise, Weltner oversaw the newly established State Board of Public Welfare, which was later renamed the Department of Family and Children Services. During this time his legal practice also grew, providing financial success that would allow his continued (often pro bono) participation in social causes.
Between 1929 and 1931, at the behest of Ivan Allen Sr., Weltner helped draft legislation to establish a governing body to oversee all Georgia public colleges and universities. Governor Richard B. Russell then appointed Weltner as the sole at-large member of the newly formed Board of Regents. Weltner later acted as the Board’s second chancellor. In this role, he worked to standardize general education across institutions, supported an expansion of vocational and agricultural education, and helped save the only state-sponsored medical college at Augusta.
Over the next decade, Weltner would serve as regional director for the New Deal’s Resettlement Administration, executive director of the Atlanta Housing Authority, and general counsel and regional attorney for the Office of Price Administration, a federal department focused on monitoring wartime inflation.
In 1944 Judge Edgar Watkins, chair of Oglethorpe University’s Board of Trustees, asked Weltner to assume the college’s presidency. When Weltner took over, Oglethorpe was hemorrhaging money and on the verge of closing. Serving as president until 1953, Weltner saved the institution by revamping the academic program and establishing a general education program (the current core curriculum program). He also elevated the academic level of the institution by securing regional accreditation in 1950. At his retirement, Weltner was gifted a plot of land behind the Brookhaven campus by the Board of Trustees, where he and his wife would live for the rest of their lives.
After Oglethorpe, Weltner remained committed to public service, chairing a study commission for the Fulton County Board of Family and Children Services and authoring the Health Code for the Georgia General Assembly. While consulting for Emory University School of Medicine, Weltner met Robert W. Woodruff, who charged him with overseeing the creation of an arts center in Atlanta, which opened as Memorial Arts Center (later Woodruff Arts Center) in 1968. During the 1960s, Weltner also held leadership positions at Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University) and Morris Brown College and walked in the funeral procession of Martin Luther King Jr.
Weltner died in 1981 after a long illness and is buried in Arlington Memorial Park in Sandy Springs beside his wife, who died in 1957. The library at Oglethorpe University is named in his honor.
