Edward Alexander Sutherland (1865-1955) was one of the most notable and successful educational reformers of the Seventh-day Adventist Church, physician, college founder. He served the church for sixty years, fifty-three of them as president of four Adventist colleges, and forty-one of those years as president of Madison College--a self-supporting Adventist institution near Nashville, Tennessee, that received no direct financial assistance from the denomination. After graduating from Battle Creek College (1890), he briefly taught there. In 1892 he became the first principal of Walla Walla College and in 1894 president. The first year (1892-1893), W. W. Prescott, education secretary for the General Conference, was the nominal president. When Sutherland was appointed president of Battle Creek College in 1897, he led in advocating moving of the college out of Battle Creek to Berrien Springs, Michigan. In 1904 he went south with Percy T. Magan and a few others to found Madison College, becoming its first president. He worked closely with Ellen White to model Madison along the educational philosophy in her writings. While president he took the medical course and graduated from the University of Tennessee in 1914. He returned to Madison College and remained its president until 1946. From 1914 to 1940 he also was medical superintendent of the sanitarium and hospital at Madison. Called by the General Conference in 1946 to establish the SDA commission on Rural Living, he was its executive secretary until his retirement in 1950. Sutherland was president of Madison at his death in 1955. Sutherland led in the campaign to eradicate the classics from Seventh-day Adventist colleges and to place the Bible at the center of the curriculum. His philosophy of holistic education permanently altered the thrust of Adventist education from the elementary through the college levels. He was instrumental in the creation of the Adventist elementary and secondary-school system and a distinctive teacher-training program. Placing major emphasis on manual labor, Sutherland developed a viable work-study curriculum and sought to instill in Adventist youth a deep commitment to being missionaries regardless of their chosen career.

Attuned to the reforms of his era, Sutherland's work was reflective of the educational innovations attempted both in the Adventist church and in society at large around the turn of the century. His aggressive actions brought to fruition many of the reforms that his Adventist predecessors in the United States had not been able to consummate, as well as reforms not previously attempted by them. Sutherland's efforts to integrate faith and learning illuminate the most significant reform period in the early years of Adventist education.