Insider Out Front

James McNaughton Hester, 37, could almost star in a play titled How to Succeed in Education Without Really Trying. He is not a practicing scholar, never taught a class, and has been a college administrator for only four years. But he has so much inborn ability that people keep pressing him to take better jobs. Last week he became the youngest president in the 130-year history of 43,000-student New York University, biggest private university complex in the U.S. Not until he got the job was Hester even sure that he wanted to stay in education.

The son of a Navy chaplain, Hester went to high school in Long Beach, Calif., simultaneously earned a summa in humanities and a magna in history at Princeton ('45), served in World War II as a Marine Corps Japanese-language officer. Then he found himself bossing "the implementation of democratization" of Japanese schools in Fukuoka Prefecture. "Ridiculous," he now calls it: "One boy 22 years old was trying to do a job for 3,000,000 people." Hester went on to a Rhodes scholarship at Oxford, where he took a doctorate in international affairs; then he tried advertising research. Recommended by impressed elders, he wound up at 33 as provost and later vice president of Long Island University.

Hester learned how to raise money, which is a good way to succeed in U.S. education. Just one year ago N.Y.U. made him dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. When President Carroll V. Newsom resigned in September. Hester was the logical insider to step out front. He knows the intricacies of N.Y.U.'s vast operation at 15 schools and colleges. Not yet through with a drive for $102.5 million. N.Y.U. is already off on another drive for $75 million, and young President Hester is likely to face many more. Now, he says, "I am thoroughly committed to higher education."

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