Education: New Man in Middletown

An old Connecticut college got a new president last week. When they heard the news, the students of small, liberal Wesleyan, in Middletown, took 39-year-old Victor Lloyd Butterfield on their shoulders and carried him up College Hill. He succeeds able, popular James L. McConaughy, who resigned last April to continue as president of United China Relief.

President Butterfield is the energetic son of the late Kenyon L. Butterfield. who was president of Rhode Island State College, Massachusetts State College and Michigan State College of Agriculture and Applied Science. Wesleyan’s new head was formerly the college’s associate dean and acting president. Despite his own training at Cornell (B.A. 1927) and Harvard (Ph. D. 1936), he is a devoted small-college man. He believes that institutions of Wesleyan’s size (about 700 students in peacetime) supply a social education that the big university has “tended to blot out.” Says he: “We must . . . provide a ferment in American society . . . creating a sound social leadership.”