James M Hester

James McNaughton Hester was born in Chester, Pa., on April 19, 1924. The son of a Navy chaplain, he spent his childhood at military posts around the world. He served as an officer in the Marine Corps in World War II, graduated with honors from Princeton, was named a Rhodes Scholar, returned to the Marines during the Korean War and received a doctorate in 1955 from Oxford, where he met and married Janet Rodes. Inaugurated as N.Y.U.’s 11th and youngest president in 1962, when he was only 38. During his nearly 14-year tenure, N.Y.U. cut spending sharply, but it also opened the 12-story Elmer Holmes Bobst Library on Washington Square, raised faculty salaries and began recruiting students from beyond the New York metropolitan area. progress was accomplished largely by selling the University Heights campus in the Bronx, closing the engineering school, paring full-time faculty positions, merging graduate and undergraduate business programs, cutting intercollegiate competition in baseball, football and basketball, and requiring various components of the university, including the school of social work, to pay their own way. His wife and their three children, Janet Gerrish, Margaret Giroux and Martha Stafford, survive him, as do seven grandchildren; his brother, Raymond; and his sister, Virginia Laddy.