Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, April 7, 1991 TAG: 9104070131
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: MADELYN ROSENBERG HIGHER EDUCATION WRITER
DATELINE: BLACKSBURG LENGTH: Long
"I saw Virginia Tech as a sleeping giant that could be awakened," the former university president said from Atlanta, where he now heads Georgia-Pacific Corp. "I thought the time was right."
At first, the move to broaden the university was met with mixed reviews. There were critics, Hahn says, who wanted the school to stay the way they remembered it. Some people were excited by the changes; others were enraged.
But as years passed and the university grew, Hahn was hailed across the state as a man of vision.
Saturday, when a new chemistry building laboratory was named in his honor as part of the Founder's Day weekend celebration, Hahn was hailed as one of the university's most outstanding faculty presidents.
Parke Brinkley, a 1939 Tech graduate and former commissioner of agriculture in Virginia, can appreciate that now.
But he was one who liked the old school with its regimens and discipline, one who saw Hahn, in the beginning, as a threat to Tech instead of as an asset.
"It was a turbulent time," Brinkley said. "But a time that had to come to make the university what it is today."
Still, "there were a lot of struggles along the way."
Administrators, for example, struggled as research was restructured so that it was coordinated under one dean. The individual colleges - or areas as they were referred to then - lost some autonomy that way, Brinkley said. And making the military corps optional was a stab to many of Tech's former cadets. Thomas Rice, rector of the Board of Visitors, resigned over the issue.
Yet changing that requirement was the only way the university could really open up, Hahn said. And he considers that change, along with developing Tech's liberal arts program and opening the university to female students, the most important during his years in Blacksburg.
Today, Tech offers 76 undergraduate degrees. Thirty were added during the Hahn years - 1962 to 1974.
"Hahn was a thinker and a planner," Brinkley said. "His changes led to great growth."
The first time Leon Rutland, a retired head of Tech's math department, met Hahn, the president was sitting behind a desk, a long computer printout in his hand.
"He motioned to it and said, `These are bills that are before the state legislature this year. If we're going to do what we want to do at this university, we need to know what they are and see that they come through the way we want.' "
Rutland, who was interviewing for a job at the time, was impressed. "He was looking at the broad picture of where Tech would fit into the state university system."
Rutland took the job, with hopes of revitalizing Tech's math department. It was what Hahn had wanted, too - part of the big revitalization project that would transform Tech's image from that of a small college to a respected, state university.
In fact, said Cliff Cutchins, rector of Tech's Board of Visitors, "the first hint of changes to come . . . was Hahn's insistence upon referring to VPI not as a college, but as a university. The mind-set resulted in not only adding "university" to our name, but in diversifying and broadening academic offerings, expanding admissions opportunities and remaking the physical plant."
The things he accomplished in first two or three years to turn the university around were amazing, Rutland said. "We look back on it and still wonder."
Hahn does not look back on the changes with an air of mystery or wonder. He had a plan, and he had help.
"There was enormous potential that existed at Tech," he said. "It had tremendous assets in terms of agriculture, engineering and business - a more beneficial impact in the state than I thought was being recognized."
He made sure legislators knew about Tech's potential.
"The times were better then," Hahn said. "But I worked hard at it. Sometimes I was criticized for being in Richmond so much and for being so political. Yet appropriations for higher education are political decisions. I had to sustain an aggressive effort. I did, and it was successful."
Twenty-five buildings were added during his years at Tech, still not enough to catch up with a rapidly increasing enrollment.
When he came to the university, about 6,000 students attended Tech. When he left, the enrollment had almost tripled.
Near the end of his years at Tech, people would ask Hahn, "Why don't you go into politics?"
And for years, the former Virginia Tech president considered it.
But now, as he approaches his 65th birthday, he laughs without regret and says it's too late.
"I came close," he said. "I had received a great deal of encouragement to run for governor in 1969. I came close to entering the race when the soundings showed I had a prospect of winning. I decided against it when I wasn't sure enough I would win. . . . I was not interested in being a defeated gubernatorial candidate."
Besides, he said, "I saw opportunities of various types ahead of me."
Like the opportunity at Georgia-Pacific.
Hahn really has had three careers during his lifetime. He was a professor of physics and the department head at Tech. He has his current career as chief executive officer at the Atlanta company. And in between he had a career in administration that brought him to colleges across the country.
Which leaves another question: Why Tech?
That all goes back to one word, Hahn said: "potential." And no one asked him that question on Saturday, when he pumped hands after a dedication of his hall - Hahn Hall, in the adjoining, sunny atrium.
"It's not often a man has the privilege of hearing his eulogy while he's still around to enjoy it," he told an audience packed with administrators, alumni, well-wishers and a fleet of Georgia-Pacific executives.
Words as a tribute to Hahn do not seem adequate, said Tech President James McComas. "Marshall Hahn is Marshall Hahn, and that's about all you can say."
But McComas smiled and said more: "There's another word for change, and that's `life.' Marshall Hahn is a part of the . . . breathing, transforming life of this university."
There are stories about Hahn at Tech, some of them funny, that make this tall, white-haired man appear bigger than life.
For instance, McComas said Saturday, there was a time when Hahn was briefly missing at sea, somewhere off the coast of Virginia, and the university was racked with worry.
McComas recalled that someone, perhaps a groundskeeper, said simply: "Marshall Hahn don't need no boat."
by CNB