Uncle John

The first thing that John A. Hannah did when he became president of Michigan State College at East Lansing in 1941 was to order the door of his office taken down and carted away. A friendly, floppy-gaited man, he wanted everybody to feel free to walk right in and talk to him. Tilted back in his swivel chair at his cluttered desk, he would listen patiently to laggard students, troubled facultymen, Michigan farmers and taxpayers. The purpose of a land-grant college, he said, should be "service to all people." Last week, after nine years, M.S.C. had reason to know what 47-year-old "Uncle John" Hannah meant.

He had come to the presidency over an unlikely route. He was really an authority on poultry. But in the '30s, as secretary of Michigan's State Board of Agriculture, the governing body of the college, he had been full of big ideas for M.S.C. When the presidency fell vacant, he was the only man the board considered.

Faith & Credit. In those days, M.S.C. had 6,500 students and ranked 23rd in size among U.S. colleges. But "we had no adequate dorms," Hannah recalls, "and the state of Michigan was broke." The $2,500,000 annual appropriation, the most the legislature thought the state could afford for the school, was not nearly enough to suit Uncle John.

He finally went to banks and demanded low-interest loans. He allowed no mortgages on school property and gave little security ("You simply have our pledge of faith and credit"). But banks all over the state began to chip in, and before long M.S.C. began to seem more like a boom town than a college.

A $2,000,000 annex to the student union building rose, complete with bowling alleys, music and art rooms, banquet hall, barbershop, cafeteria, lounges, student-activities offices and hotel rooms for visitors. Near by, six new dormitories went up, along with eleven low-rent apartment houses for faculty members. A modernized stadium echoed with the yells of 60,000 Michigan State football fans, There were also new buildings for electrical engineering, agriculture, physics and mathematics, and general science.

Beside many of the new buildings on his rolling campus, Uncle John placed neat white-and-green signs, announcing that the structure would cost taxpayers nothing; rents, cafeteria profits, ticket fees and similar profits would make them self-liquidating. "In eleven years," says Hannah happily, "we'll be entirely out of debt."

In President Hannah's nine years, Michigan State College has almost trebled in size; this year enrollments total 16,000 full-time students. But the 16,000 are only a small fraction of those who study at M.S.C. Each year, some 100,000 people come from all over the state to take special short-term courses. They include insurance salesmen and pickle packers, fur breeders and cattlemen, farmers who come 40,000 strong for the annual Farmers' Week. For those who cannot make the trip, M.S.C. has other means of extending "service": lecturers, farm and home demonstrators, and assorted publications running to a million circulation a year.

Bigger & Better. Last week, as students flocked back for the beginning of spring term, they found Uncle John in a celebrating mood. A new $4,000,000 dormitory had just been opened--the $31 million mark of his nine-year building program.

But Uncle John himself was just the same, still striding into his doorless office at 7:30 a.m. to get ready for his callers, still plumping loudly for bigger & better Michigan State teams ("I see no harm at all in a big stadium, big field house, and big crowds . . ."), still puttering about his two-acre truck garden when he can find the time. He had some additional building ideas too. With the new dormitory finished, he was pestering the state legislature to get $3,000,000 for a new library.

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