Jardine to Wichita

When Democratic professors are in the saddle, a Republican politician is generally glad to find any sort of academic haven he can. In Kansas last week William M. Jardine, onetime (1925-29) Secretary of Agriculture, onetime (1930-33) Minister to Egypt, accepted with great pleasure a call to the presidency of Municipal University of Wichita.

Rangy, smiling, hard-muscled "Bill" Jardine, 55, started life as an Idaho ranch-hand. At 20 he entered Utah Agricultural College, stayed on to teach, made himself an expert in agronomy. Rated an able administrator, he had been Kansas State Agricultural College's president for seven years when in 1925 President Coolidge called him to Washington to head the Department of Agriculture. There he wrestled long and successfully against McNary-Haugenism. President Hoover sent him to Egypt largely because the Jardine family did not want to go back to Kansas.

Agriculturist-Diplomat Jardine's lame-duck return from Egypt last autumn was timely for Kansas Republicans. He was just the well-known, respected stop-gap they needed for the State Treasury, headless and reeking after the Finney bond scandal (TIME, Aug. 21 et seq.).

Municipal University of Wichita was organized as Fairmount Institute in 1892, taken over by the city in 1926. It has a rolling, 80-acre campus on the city's edge, some 2,000 students enrolled in colleges of Arts and Sciences, Business Administration & Industry, Education, Fine & Applied Arts, Aeronautics. Most famed is its Omnibus College which each summer takes 700 students on a camping-out bus ride over the U. S. and Canada, with courses and credits on the go (TIME, July 17).

Last week President-elect Jardine, announcing he would resign as State Treasurer March 1, was cheerful about his return to academic life. Said he: "An excellent opportunity is offered to accomplish much that would be impossible in an old, established school."

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