Malcom MacLean, 1931

The pioneer-
Malcolm MacLean

General College is undergoing a profound transformation over the next few years, becoming a department within the College of Education and Human Development. The final issues of Access, the General College magazine, will look back at other transition points in the college's history.
We begin at the beginning.

By Tim Brady

When Malcolm Shaw MacLean arrived in the fall of 1932 to become the first director of the Junior College of the University of Minnesota (renamed General College a year later), he was a newcomer neither to the University nor to the world of educational reform that had prompted the creation of the college. MacLean had first come to Minneapolis as a graduate student in 1919, and 10 years later, he was awarded his Ph.D. in English. His study was interrupted by a three-year stint during which MacLean served as a night editor at The Minneapolis Tribune.

He was also an instructor in English and a student counselor during his graduate school years; it was in these positions that he first developed an interest in what would come to be called “general education.” Simply put, general education was the idea that universities ought to broaden the base of their student populations and provide an education that was more conducive to those undergraduates who enrolled at the college without knowing precisely what sort of studies they wanted to pursue.

MacLean took his first academic job, as an associate professor of English, at one of the nation’s first headquarters for general education, the University of Wisconsin Extension Center in Milwaukee. He spent the next three years in Wisconsin, before he was hired to lead the U of M’s grand experiment in “a new and better kind of general education,” as he would put it years later in a speech describing the General College’s beginnings.

In the fall of 1932, the program opened its doors in Wesbrook Hall, a place that, according to MacLean, had recently been abandoned by the School of Dentistry, and was “cluttered with pipes and wires, broken plaster and splintered floors.” He had a faculty of two, consisting of assistant director Fred Hovde, and Bob Kissack, who was assigned to develop a new tool in education—film—by means of a Visual Education Service. A secretary, June Whitney, completed the staff in the newly created General College.

The program had 489 students in its first year and 700 the next. To provide appropriate courses for all of these people, MacLean and his staff had to beg, borrow, and steal the time, energy, and labor of faculty and staff from various departments all over the university. “All of us were as busy as bird dogs,” MacLean would write. And there was still much resistance, within the more conservative corners of the institution, about the very concept of general education. Enough quality resources were found, however, to make the college a model for learning all over the country.

MacLean himself was in such great demand to come to universities across the nation to describe the Minnesota experiment that, by 1936, he’d become a member of the 100,000-Mile Air Club. These were the early years of commercial flying and air miles were no picnic. MacLean’s were flown, as he described it in 1962, “in hedge-hopping fabric biplanes, Ford tri-motors, and other primitive ancestors of the jets.”

Malcom MacLean (right) received the University's Outstanding Alumni Award from Vice President for Institutional Relations Stanley Wenberg, 1968.

As word of the program spread, foundation money began to pour into the school. Grants from Carnegie and Rockefeller helped fine tune the General College’s concepts and produce a number of publications that further enhanced the college’s reputations. The size of the faculty and staff was doubled and doubled again. By the time Malcolm MacLean was hired away from the General College in 1940 to become president of Hampton Institute, one of the country’s leading black schools in Hampton, Virginia, the University had lost one of the most recognizable leaders in general education in the nation. It had been left, however, with a solid beginning and a well-established program.

There would be more stops for MacLean in a career that stretched into the 1960s. During World War II, he served as a commander in the U. S. Navy, serving in North Africa, Sicily, and in the Pacific theater. After the war, he was hired by UCLA as a professor of higher education, and there he stayed until his retirement.

When he returned to the University in 1962 to give a speech on the occasion of the 30th anniversary of the General College, MacLean recalled the early days of the school and the many educators who had helped shape the college. “We shared both our knowledge and our ignorance. Cross-fertilization of ideas was terrific. It developed in us a profound respect and liking for persons and disciplines for which previously we had had little or none. We lost our arrogance and attained humility. And out of all of this emerged the General College of that time, crude and primitive perhaps as we look back upon it, but sound in basic design.”

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