Edwin Anderson Alderman was born on May 15, 1861, in Wilmington, North Carolina.

He was an educator and the first president of the University of Virginia. He studied at Bethel Military Academy, Virginia (1876-1878) and the University of North Carolina (B.Phil., 1882). He became a schoolteacher in Goldsboro, North Carolina, superintendent of city schools there (1885-1889) and conductor of the state teachers' institutes (1889-1892). In 1891, Alderman and Charles Duncan McIver successfully pressed the North Carolina Legislature to establish the Normal and Industrial School for Women, now known as the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. He was elected a member of the American Historical Association in 1892, a member of the Maryland Historical Society in 1893, and a member of the National Education Association in 1894. In 1892, Alderman became a professor of history at State Normal College. In 1893, he became a professor of pedagogy at the University of North Carolina and was named its president in 1896. Then he moved on to take the same position at Tulane University in 1900, and in 1904, he became the first president of the University of Virginia, the position he held until he died in 1931. Alderman received the honorary D.C.L. from the University of the South in 1896, LL.D. from Tulane University in 1898, and Johns Hopkins University in 1902. He was a noted public speaker and won fame for his memorial address for Woodrow Wilson, delivered to a joint session of Congress on December 15, 1924.

In 1886, he married Emma Selina Graves (1858–1896), and in 1904, he remarried Bessie Green Hearn (1881–1959). He died on April 30, 1931, in Connellsville, Pennsylvania.