John Royston Coleman was born on June 24, 1921, in Copper Cliff, Ontario. His father, Richard, was a superintendent at a smelter operated by the mining company Inco. His mother, the former Mary Lawson, was a homemaker.  After earning an economics degree in 1943 from Victoria University, part of the University of Toronto, he served with the Royal Canadian Navy during World War II, attaining the rank of commander.  Soon after completing officers’ school, he married Mary Norrington Irwin. The marriage ended in divorce, as did a second marriage. In addition to his grandson William, he is survived by two sons, John and Stephen; a daughter, Nancy Coleman; and six other grandchildren.  He pursued graduate studies in labor economics at the University of Chicago, where he received a master’s degree in 1949, and a doctorate in 1950, writing a dissertation on collective bargaining.  After leaving Chicago, he taught economics and labor relations at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where he became friends with George P. Shultz, later secretary of state under President Ronald Reagan. He and Mr. Shultz, an economist by training, collaborated on the book “Labor Problems: Cases and Readings” (1953).  Mr. Coleman’s other books include “Goals and Strategy in Collective Bargaining” (1951), written with Frederick H. Harbison, “The Changing American Economy” (1967) and “Comparative Economic Systems: An Inquiry Approach” (1968).  In 1955 Mr. Coleman became chairman of the economics department at the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie-Mellon University), where he later served as dean of the division of humanities and social sciences. His gifts as a lecturer led to the job of host of “Money Talks,” a five-part series on CBS in 1962 in which he explained such basic concepts as gross national product and the Consumer Price Index.  A year later, for the CBS project “College of the Air,” he taught an experimental course, “The American Economy,” that was carried on 241 affiliate stations and 54 educational channels.  In 1965 the Ford Foundation, for which he had done consulting work in New Delhi during a sabbatical, hired him as a director of economic development and administration. He was later its program officer for social development.  At Haverford, Mr. Coleman pushed for changes that chimed with the spirit of the times. He closed down the college football program — the college bookstore today sells T-shirts with the slogan “Haverford Football: Undefeated Since 1971” — and rescinded the rule barring long hair and beards for intercollegiate athletes. In May 1970, he bused nearly 700 students, teachers, board members and alumni to Washington to protest the American bombing campaign in Cambodia.  While traveling around the country raising money for the school, Mr. Coleman collected want ads from local newspapers and, as part of his secret plan, applied for work. “There’s a restlessness in me, a desire to walk in other people’s shoes,” he told The Associated Press in 1987.  He dug ditches for sewer and water lines in Atlanta, picking up a rich new vocabulary of curse words; hauled trash in College Park, Md.; and made salads and sandwiches at the Union Oyster House in Boston, where his talent won him an offer to become assistant chef.  His work schedule was compromised by his duties as chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank in Philadelphia, which held monthly meetings, requiring him to serve notice to his employers.  “To follow him down to the depth of his ditches and then up again to the heights of conference rooms is to take an exhilarating roller-coaster ride,” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt wrote in a review of “Blue-Collar Journal” for The Times. “To watch him as he gradually masters the art of constructing a viable club sandwich, while at the same time serving up strawberry shortcake and mixing cocktail sauce, is to experience a vicarious thrill of accomplishment.”  After leaving Haverford, Mr. Coleman became president of the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, where he channeled his effort into prison reform and combating the tropical parasitic disease schistosomiasis. His idea of field research was to spend time undercover as an inmate or guard in several prisons.  In 1986 he opened a bed-and-breakfast, the Inn at Long Last in Chester, Vt., where he served as host and breakfast cook. He later ran a small local weekly, The Black River Tribune, and served as a justice of the peace, presiding over one of the first same-sex civil unions in Vermont in 2000.  Mr. Coleman lost the battle but won the war at Haverford. In 1980, three years after he left, the school became coed and awarded him an honorary doctorate. Catherine Koshland, one of 39 women admitted to Haverford in 1969 as transfer students under a program he started, and who later became the chairwoman of the college’s board of managers, told the college website, “Although he was no longer the president, coeducation is perhaps Jack’s most significant legacy.”  A version of this article appears in print on September 9, 2016, on page B15 of the New York edition with the headline: John R. Coleman, College President Who Tried Blue-Collar Life, Dies at 95. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
A labor economist, he was a strong voice at the Philadelphia-area college in the 1960s for the admission of women and against the Vietnam War.