
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, September 29, 1993                   TAG: 9312220241
SECTION: EDITORIAL                    PAGE: A6   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: 
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

A LOSS FOR TECH - AND BEYOND

DURING HIS FIVE years at Virginia Tech, President James D. McComas has provided common sense and a focused intelligence at the helm, and a sense of what a contemporary university should be doing.

That, when McComas came to Blacksburg in the summer of 1988, is pretty much what the doctor ordered for an institution whose leadership had been floundering.

Now come new doctors' orders, unfortunately of a nonmetaphorical kind. McComas, 64, is retiring and returning to Ohio, where he will be with family as he is treated with chemotherapy to fight the cancer for which he underwent colon surgery a few days ago.

It is a serious time for McComas; it is also a serious time for higher education in Virginia - a point that the Tech president continued to make even as he was announcing his retirement.

Tech faculty, staff, students and parents, he urged, must press state legislators to protect Virginia's colleges and universities from budget cuts even more drastic than what they've already been dealt.

In some respects, those cutbacks forced McComas, like other college heads in the state, into a rearguard presidency. But the McComas-led Tech is in far better position than before to make the case that higher education is too valuable to take lightly.

This is in part a consequence of policies he pursued - for example, his insistence that a modern university must be an active player in the world around it, and no mere scholarly retreat in spendid isolation from the larger community.

McComas' departure will be a loss not only for Tech and the New River Valley but also for the Roanoke Valley, which he firmly identified as part of the community that should be served by the university and its resources.

Tech has benefited, too, from the personal traits McComas brought to Burruss Hall: his dignity in sometimes trying circumstances, his open-mindedness, his willingness to listen. He helped heal the wounds left by the controversies over athletics and land deals that had plagued a previous administration.

Now, McComas himself pursues the healing powers of modern medicine. May the best wishes of the community he sought to serve go with him.

by CNB