Former President of Virginia Tech, Marshall Hahn, died this past weekend. He was 89. Hahn brought great change to the university during his tenure. He served from 1962 until 1974. Robbie Harris has this remembrance of a university president who, in many ways, was ahead of his time.
Marshall Hahn became president of what was then called The Virginia Polytechnic Institute in 1962 when he was just 35 years old. A child prodigy, he graduated from the University of Kentucky at 18 and got his PhD in Physics from MIT 5 years later. People who knew him describe his photographic memory. Ray Smoot interned for Hahn as an undergrad and recently retired as head of the Virginia Tech Foundation.
“He could walk into a room of 30 people he had never met and go around the room and each person could introduce himself or herself and then sit down at a table and he would call each person by name during the meeting.”
Hahn used those skills to garner support for the many changes he would bring to the university and Smoot says, he was savvy about how to attract attention to the school.
“He continued throughout his life to be very supportive of expanding the academic programs at Virginia Tech and the athletic programs. Marshall’s interest in athletics was primarily as a vehicle to advertise the rest of the university in the public media. As Marshall once observed, he said, 'You know they have a sports section in every newspaper but they don’t have an academic page in every newspaper.'
When Hahn began his tenure at Tech, they also didn’t have much diversity. There were restrictions against female students, and non-white student. Membership in the U.S. Core of Cadets was mandatory. Peter Wallenstein co-authored a book called "Marshall Hahn and the Transformation of Virginia Tech."
“The categorical exclusions that characterized Tech’s history right down to 1964 on race, on gender and the corps, those 3 things –2 of then he knew he had to change – The third one he learned quickly he had to.”
Wallenstein points out, the student and faculty populations tripled under Hahn. When he arrived, students couldn’t major in the arts or humanities but when he left they could get their masters’ degrees in those disciplines as well.
“He took over a college that was already pretty sizeable and showed considerable promise but it was largely undergraduate, overwhelmingly male, and overwhelmingly white. It was a teaching college and when he left, it was a university.”
A viewing will be held from 3-6 p.m. Friday, June 10, at McCoy Funeral Home, 150 Country Club Drive, Blacksburg, VA
A memorial service will take place at 11 a.m. Saturday, June 11, in Burruss Hall on the Virginia Tech campus