Marine to President

To the lone society of two men who are presidents of eastern women's colleges, has now been added Dr. Roswell Gray Ham. An ex-captain in the U. S. Marines, he has been selected to head Mt. Holyoke College, the first male president in its 101 years. It began as a female seminary in 1836, today is pioneer among schools to offer higher education to women.

It took almost a regiment of Marines to overcome the opposition to Dr. Ham's appointment. He personally was under no harsh scrutiny. He had taught in Woman's College of Albertus Magnus and had faced co-eds at the Universities of California and Washington. It was just that under woman's hands, notably those of retiring 74-year-old President Mary Emma Wooley, Mt. Holyoke had grown to an eight-and-a-half million endowment. During her 37-year administration, enrollment has doubled, the faculty quadrupled.

Dr. Ham is 45, six-foot-three, a native of California. For 16 years he taught at Yale, a good part of that time as professor of English. He is much younger than Smith's William Allan Neilson and Vassar's Henry Noble McCracken, who have learned to delight their girls with clowning.