Malott as chancellor: just 'one of the boys'
By Swaebou Conateh
In January 1951, Chancellor Deane W. Malotl returned from a trip to the east coast to meet a gathering of 150 students with a band at the Santa Fe railway station. Rumors about his appointment to the presidency of Cornell University were already circulating the KU campus.
"As yet I have received no offer for any other job and have not accepted any." he said.
But the offer soon reached the chancellor, and the students' worst fears were realized. Malott was the first native Kansan, and the first graduate of KU to be chancellor here. But that was not the only reason why his impending resignation caught the students' emotions. Malott was more than a chancellor to them. He was one of them.
He dug dandelions to their thrill in front of Strong Hall, skied on his front lawn, rode in the traditional night shirt parade or opened the door to students, those of them picking up their dates from sorority houses where he got sold on as doorman.
But many will also agree with John H. Nelson, who was then dean of the graduate school. "He leaves the university stronger in every way than when he arrived," he said of Malott.
When Malott came to KU in 1939, there were 4,600 students. There was only a department of
journalism, and the medical center had no post-graduate program. The amount of private gifts was down at $153,000. The number of full time teachers was a mere 500.
When he left, the student population had more than doubled while the faculty increased by threefold. The William Allen White School of Journalism and Public Information was established together with the postgraduate program at the medical center.
"This university is proud of the fact that it is the university of the state of Kansas," he wrote to the House Committee on Un-American Activities which, in an attempt to uncover Communist propaganda in text books, asked the chancellor for a list of books used at KU and the names of their authors.
Malott called this effort an almost impossible and certainly a meaningless task. "Either we are afraid of the truth or we are not. Democracy cannot be taught through fear."
But that was not the only issue over which Malott made strong statements. Indeed, his many speaking engagements from high school commencements and chamber of commerce meetings in Kansas to addresses at other universities as far afield as Europe and Asia, had given him ample opportunity to speak his
views and to relate to Kansans what the rest of the country and the world was thinking.
Some of his ideas have been incorporated in government programs, others have stood the test of time and still sound very contemporary.
For instance, in 1950 he told a National Association of State Universities conference that there ought to be a universal military training requirement for all men; those already in college could have service in the ROTC programs so that they would have been on reserve commission when they should enter the service.
He spoke against deferments on the basis of scholarship because "it would place undue influence on scholastic grades ignoring other qualifications or lack of them."
Malott also caught the mood of the underdeveloped countries when he said "Americans must turn their attention to Asia rather than to Europe. . . . The outstanding problem in the world today is human misery. The downtrodden people in India, Asia and Africa constitute . . . the greatest challenge to our leadership."
6 Daily Kansan Tuesday, April 12, 1966
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