Martin has spent his entire adult life in higher education, serving institutions like Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and New York University before going on to Middlebury College where he was assistant professor of history and assistant to the President from 1976 to 1980. From 1980 to 1986, he was Associate Dean of the Divinity School at Harvard University and Lecturer on British Church History. Then, for the next twenty years, he served as president and professor of history at two liberal arts colleges, Moravian College in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania from 1986 to 1997 and Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia from 1997 to 2006.
