Exit Methuselah

As a highly talented manager, John A. Hannah, 66, might well be running some huge corporation in Detroit or Pittsburgh. Instead, he has spent 27 years running Michigan State University in East Lansing--a record tenure that entitles him to bill himself as "the Methuselah of university presidents." To admirers and critics, he has also come to symbolize that unique American institution, the land-grant college, of which M.S.U., founded in 1855, was the prototype. One of his admirers, President Nixon has now tapped Hannah to head the Agency for International Development--an appointment that should win swift Senate approval and please the 68 countries to which AID renders technical and economic assistance.

Hannah is an evangelist for land-grant colleges, which engineered the farm revolution and now boast that "the world is our campus." His approach makes purists shudder. As they see it, M.S.U. is a big "service station" that fills up students with trade-school courses like Sewage Treatment or the Dynamics of Packaging. To Hannah, the criticism is almost a compliment: "The object of the land-grant tradition was not to de-emphasize scholarship but to emphasize its application."

Under Hannah, M.S.U. has grown from a sleepy agricultural college of 6,390 students into a 5,000-acre "meg-aversity" with an enrollment of 42,541 and an annual budget of more than $100 million. Critics point out that Hannah began building the reputation of M.S.U. by building a championship football team, and that the school's freewheeling recruiting tactics earned N.C.A.A. censure in 1964. They sometimes overlook the fact that Hannah has also succeeded in recruiting many bright young professors by paying some of the highest beginning salaries of any Midwestern university.

A hulking, ruddy-faced Michigander with a gift for promotion, Hannah was born in Grand Rapids, the son of a Unitarian poultryman and an Irish Catholic schoolmarm. Himself an M.S.U.-trained ('23) poultry breeder, he became president of the International Baby Chick Association, supervised egg production for the NRA during the Depression. At 32, spurning an offer of $18,000 a year from a Chicago food-packing firm, he returned to M.S.U. as his alma mater's $4,500-a-year business manager. He chose wisely. By 1941, he had married the president's daughter and succeeded his father-in-law in the front office.

Pitchmanship. Hannah was frankly no scholar. "It was too late for me to become academically respectable," he recalls, "but I did make a point of reading at least one book a week that I didn't want to read." A charismatic speaker, he also made a point of frequently outtalking the rival University of Michigan for state funds. His "academic pitchmanship," as critics called it, soon turned M.S.U. into a vast complex of 85 departments offering 20 different degrees. Sometimes Hannah's enterprise proved a bit embarrassing. Three years ago Ramparts magazine happily broke the news that an M.S.U. program for training South Viet Nam policemen had provided cover for CIA agents. Despite Hannah's hustle, moreover, efforts to recruit seasoned academic stars have been largely unsuccessful. Even so, the university is now especially strong in such subjects as biophysics, sociology and psychology. This year M.S.U. boasts more Merit Scholars than any other campus in the country--684 compared with second-place Harvard's 503.

Hannah will be no stranger in Washington, having served as adviser to the Point Four Program under Truman and as chairman of the U.S. Civil Rights Commission under Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson. Hannah also pioneered in getting land-grant colleges to help raise food production in hungry nations abroad. M.S.U. itself has administered ten AID projects, including development of an agriculture college in Argentina and an M.S.U.-style university in Nigeria. Whatever cloistered scholars think of him, Hannah is obviously the kind of populist educator who yearns to make U.S. expertise serve those who need it.

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