Education: On the Map

By normal standards, academic or otherwise, there is little about Defiance (Ohio) College to attract distinguished visitors. It is a small (248 students), old creaking place that two years ago was hovering dangerously close to bankruptcy. But last week, Defiance played host to a man who had traveled 575 miles to lay the cornerstone of its new library. “I am here,” explained President Dwight Eisenhower, “because of my affection and admiration for Kevin and Ruth McCann.”

In the last two years, Defiance has come to have a good deal of affection for the McCanns, too. Since Kevin McCann took over as president in 1951, the college has begun to hum with new hope. An industrial engineer who enlisted as an

Army private in 1942 and rose to become Eisenhower’s personal assistant* and biographer (Man from Abilene), energetic Kevin McCann, 49, has dedicated himself to the once unlikely proposition that Defiance can be put on the map.

In 1951, the college was so poor that it had not been able to afford a new building for 35 years. Then the board of trustees began asking various university heads to recommend a man who might make a good president. At Columbia University, McCann read the letter addressed to his boss, and sent it along with a scrawled memo: “A good candidate for this job occupies the adjoining room to you. Will you recommend him?”

At first McCann was on campus only occasionally (he wanted to see Ike through the campaign), but he never forgot his duties. He turned the $20,000 royalties from his book over to a Mamie Eisenhower Scholarship Fund. He made speeches, sent the fees back to the college. He also began nagging some of his old friends for money. By the end of his first year, Defiance was out of the red.

McCann upped his endowment to $300,000, increased faculty salaries an average $1,500, persuaded Editor DeWitt Wallace of the Reader’s Digest to contribute a new recreation center, got the Philadelphia Bulletin to donate a press on which he hopes to print books of Americana. Most important, McCann raised enough money to start building the new library.

Last week, after seeing his old boss off to his train, President McCann was percolating plans as hard as ever (“I can dream, can’t I?). Among his dreams: a new office building, a chapel, a field house, two dormitories, a $1,000,000 endowment, at least 300 students.

-This week, Ike called Kevin McCann back to Washington as a special consultant (mainly speech writing).