Few men in U. S. education have had so spectacular a rise to fame as sharp-eyed, aggressive Malcolm MacLean. Nine years ago he was a relatively obscure teacher of University of Wisconsin extension students, before that had been a small-town newspaper publisher and night editor of the Minneapolis Tribune. Then he was appointed director of University of Minnesota's General College, an experiment for educating misfit college students. Dr. MacLean's college ("The University of Tomorrow"—TIME, Sept. 18) became a model for similar schools, and Dr. MacLean began to be talked of as a likely candidate for bigger things.
Last week Malcolm MacLean quit Minnesota to take a new job that surprised even his friends. He was elected president of Negro Hampton Institute, across from Norfolk, Va. on Chesapeake Bay. Dr.
MacLean will be Hampton's sixth president (all whites), will succeed Dr. Arthur Howe (a onetime Yale All-America quarterback), who recently resigned because retrenchments had made him unpopular among the faculty. Still the most heavily endowed Negro College ($9,000,000), 72-year-old Hampton is a strictly vocational school (farming, business, teaching, homemaking, trades), has 950 students, 139 buildings.