Daniel L. Ritchie

Daniel L. Ritchie is the Chancellor Emeritus of the University of Denver, a former CEO of major communication corporations, and a Harvard alumnus. He hails from China Grove, North Carolina and has moved around the country from coast to coast before eventually settling in Denver, Colorado.

Ritchie attended Harvard University in Boston, Massachusetts where he earned a bachelor’s degree and a Masters in Business Administration from Harvard Business School. After earning his degrees from Harvard, he briefly served in the Army and then as a securities analyst in New York.

Ritchie came to Colorado to run Columbia Savings and Loan in the 1960s. After working with Columbia Savings and Loan, Ritchie moved to Hollywood, where he served as executive vice president of MCA Inc.. He lived in the house that actor Michael Wilding built for Elizabeth Taylor and earned a large salary, but, according to Ritchie, Hollywood left him queasy, so he left what he termed the "grubby" and "heartless" business of Hollywood.

After his years in Hollywood, Ritchie entered the organic foods industry as an entrepreneur and then spent eight years as CEO of Westinghouse Broadcasting. Ritchie was reportedly especially proud that Westinghouse broke the AIDS story nationally while he was at its helm. As Ritchie recalled in a 2005 article honoring his legacy, an affiliate station in San Francisco came to him with solid reporting about a new plague that was terrifying the medical community. The story was so startling—and its ramifications so serious—that Ritchie said he knew it merited national attention. Ritchie and his team decided to cancel the corporation’s prime-time lineup in favor of a report chronicling the virus. “It cost us money not to have prime-time programming,” he explained, noting that no company wanted its products promoted during such an alarming program. Nonetheless, he said, he and his team made the decision to put public need ahead of the bottom line—a consideration, he said, that he doubted would be respected by today’s broadcasting leadership. “It used to be that we were expected to make good money, but we were also expected to be responsive to public need,” he noted.

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