Robert F. Goheen, who as president of Princeton revolutionized the university by admitting its first women, pursuing minority faculty members, buttressing finances and doubling the space in campus buildings, died on Monday in Princeton, N.J. He was 88.

The cause was heart failure, Cass Cliatt, a Princeton spokeswoman said.

In November 1956, Dr. Goheen was as surprised as most of academia when he was chosen at 37 to be the youngest Princeton president since the Revolutionary War. An assistant classics professor, he had thought the trustees wanted to speak with him about what younger faculty members wanted in a new president. Instead, they unanimously elected him to the job.

In an interview with The New York Herald Tribune on June 30, 1957, the day before he assumed the presidency, Dr. Goheen emphasized that he intended to preserve individualized instruction.

“The thoughtful, creative minds which we require in numbers in all important aspects of our national life cannot be mass produced,” he said.

But buildings can. Dr. Goheen would eventually build or acquire 38 buildings, increasing the university’s indoor square footage by 80 percent. He quadrupled the budget, doubled alumni giving and increased the number of faculty members by 40 percent.

The university changed fundamentally under Dr. Goheen’s leadership, going from an establishment cradle to a diversified and complex research university. He attacked the exclusivity of the eating clubs, even opening one to be run by the university. He hired Princeton’s first black administrator and first black full professor and aggressively recruited promising minority students.

Dr. Goheen opposed coeducation in 1965 but said four years later that necessity mandated it. “I was just plain wrong in 1965,” he said “It’s no use pretending you’re not wrong when you are.”

He explained that Princeton was losing excellent male applicants, not to mention brilliant young women. But he first laid the groundwork by increasing the size of the faculty so that more undergraduates would not mean larger classes.

He weathered the protests, the rebellion and the confusion that swept higher education in the 1960s, using humor and urging civilized debate. He had little use for angry protest, even when he agreed with the protesters, as he ultimately did with critics of the Vietnam War.

Robert Francis Goheen was born on Aug. 15, 1919, in Vengurla, India, where his parents were medical missionaries.

At 15, he moved to the United States to attend the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey. At Princeton, he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa and won its top academic prize. He completed a year of graduate work in the classics before enlisting in the Army in 1941. He served in intelligence in the War Department, then in the infantry in the South Pacific, receiving the Legion of Merit and the Bronze Star.

He received his Ph.D. from Princeton in 1948 while working as a part-time instructor. He became a full-time instructor and then an assistant professor.

Beginning in 1963, Dr. Goheen was also director of the Woodrow Wilson Fellowships, which encourage young scholars to pursue academic careers, helping to persuade the Princeton trustees of his administrative competence.

Dr. Goheen wrote “The Imagery of Sophocles’ Antigone” (1951), which was widely and well reviewed. On his retirement in 1972, Dr. Goheen became president of the Council on Foundations. In 1977, he was appointed United States ambassador to India, where he served until 1980. In 1981, he became a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs of Princeton University.

Dr. Goheen is survived by his wife of 66 years, the former Margaret Skelly; his daughters Anne Goheen Crane of Ridgewood, N.J.; Trudi Goheen Swain of Amherst, Mass.; Megan Goheen Lower of Baltimore; and Elizabeth Goheen of Princeton; his sons Stephen, of Corvallis, Mont., and Charley, of Wellesley, Mass.; 18 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.

When the Rev. Theodore Hesburgh, early in his tenure as president of Notre Dame, asked Dr. Goheen in 1952 how his school, much the same size as Princeton, could go about getting Princeton’s reputation for scholarship, Dr. Goheen answered, "First, fire the football coach."