Man to Mount Holyoke

Oldest of the East's five famed women's colleges, Mount Holyoke sits comfortably on its ancient campus in small South Hadley, Mass, for the purpose of making 1,000 smart girls from 37 states smarter. Over this establishment for 36 years has presided massive, distinguished Mary Emma Woolley, longtime Friend of Peace. Last year President Woolley, now 73, sent her trustees searching for a successor. That they had been hard pressed to fill "May" Woolley's ample chair was evident last week when, announcing a "clean break with tradition," they chose as Mount Holyoke's third president neither a graduate nor a woman but Executive Fellow Roswell Gray Ham of Yale's Jonathan Edwards College.

Upon leaving Yale, President-Elect Ham need not feel entirely as though he were joining an academic hen party. Among administrators of big U. S. women's colleges he has such companions as Smith's witty Scottish William Allan Neilson and Vassar's Henry Noble MacCracken. But Roswell Ham will be the first head man at Mount Holyoke, a jealously feminine citadel since it was founded in 1837 as a ladies' seminary by Spinster Mary Lyon.

Tall, burly, deep-voiced Roswell Gray Ham is 45, married, has two sons. Before receiving a captain's commission in the Wartime Marine Corps, he had taught at University of Washington and University of California. After the War he went to Yale's Graduate School, has been a mem ber of Yale's English Department since 1920. When he goes to his new post in September 1937, after President Woolley officiates at next year's centenary celebra tion, Mount Holyoke girls can expect a change in presidential speaking fare. President-elect Ham's specialty is not Peace but the poetry of John Dryden, on which he is a top-ranking authority.

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