Fr. Robert Probst Papers

Robert Probst was a St. Paul, Minnesota, native who attended St. Mark’s grade school, Cretin High School, and the College of St. Thomas.  He graduated from St. Thomas in 1939 with a major in chemistry and minors in mathematics and education. He went on to study at the Saint Paul Seminary and was ordained a Roman Catholic priest in August 1945. He later earned a master’s in analytical chemistry at the University of Minnesota and did graduate studies in philosophy at Laval University in Quebec. Probst taught for a year at the St. Thomas Military Academy before joining the faculty of the College of St. Thomas in 1946. He taught philosophy, religion, chemistry, and a course on the history of films over the years. He became St. Thomas’s assistant Dean of Studies in 1958.  When St. Thomas received its first computer in 1964, Fr. Probst developed a system for handling all student records, including grades, transcripts and billing information. Even after his official retirement, he continued to work on issues related to computing at the university. Msgr. Probst passed away on October 24, 2007, in Saint Paul at the age of 89.