Old soldiers are getting other jobs these days. Columbia University, with 31,000 students, picked a five-star general to run the show. This week Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., with 740 students, chose a lieutenant colonel. Old Andover men were in for a surprise: the new headmaster never went to prep school, never taught at one, has never even seen his new post.
The appointment was just as surprising to the new headmaster, shy, softspoken, young (35) Lieut. Colonel John Mason Kemper, deputy chief of the Army's Historical Division. Until Andover's trustees penetrated the labyrinthine Pentagon to proposition him, Colonel Kemper was a convinced career soldier. Says he: "I've never known anything else."
John Kemper's earliest memories are of life as an Army brat, trailing his father, an infantry officer, from post to post, getting a lick-&-a-promise schooling. At West Point, John managed the lacrosse team and was president of the class of '35. Four years later, he went back to the Point to teach history.
When war came, Kemper built the Historical Division from a paper directive to an organization of 300 historians working as teams in combat areas. Their findings will fill 99 volumes. On this job, Kemper met Historian James Phinney Baxter, president of Williams College and an Andover trustee. Baxter found Kemper refreshingly free of brass-hattitudes. He thought Kemper would be the man to succeed retiring Claude Moore Fuess (TIME, May 5). Says Kemper of his first civilian post: "Gosh, it's a big job."
Colorado College, founded by a Union general, last week also reached for a West Pointer instead of a scholar. Its new head: lean, weather-beaten Major General William Hanson Gill, 61, who rebuilt the shattered 32nd Division after the Buna campaign, led it back to Leyte (TIME, Dec. 4,1944), defeated General Yamashita.