NEW MU CHIEF HAS A RESUME THAT YOU JUST WON'T BELIEVE

To the lengthy list of current-or-soon-to-be-underway development projects in the greater Cape Girardeau area, related here two weeks ago today, add Southeast Missouri Hospital's $30 million project revealed on page one in today's edition. This three-phase expansion is not exactly a small one. Add it to the new Mississippi River bridge project (+-$75 million), the flood control project ($30 million), and all the other projects mentioned here two weeks ago, and it's apparent that over the next decade we'll be seeing plenty of work leading to major improvements in our community.

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The new president of the University of Missouri system has a resume that's among the most impressive I've ever seen, and reading it will knock your eyes out. Seventy-year-old Dr. George Albert Russell is a native of Bertrand, Missouri near Charleston, and he's married (four children) to the former Ruth Ann Ashby, a Charleston native. Since 1977, he has served as Chancellor of the University of Missouri-Kansas City.

The guy's a rocket scientist and a real Missourian, whose childhood memories include chopping cotton in the Bootheel a few miles south of here. At an age when many are already several years into retirement, Dr. Russell embarks on a new and exciting phase in a remarkable career. How remarkable? Judge for yourself.

Dr. Russell holds a B.S. degree in electrical engineering from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Both his Masters and Ph.D. are in physics from the University of Illinois, one of the country's most academically distinguished state universities.

Dr. Russell served in the U.S. Navy, retiring in 1960 with the rank of Commander. During that military service, roughly half his time was with operational forces, and half with research and development. He has lectured extensively in anti-submarine warfare, which is a special area of concentration for him. He worked in rocketry and missile development under the famed Dr. Robert Goddard at the Naval Engineering Experiment Station at Annapolis, Maryland.

For the layman such as myself, to read Dr. Russell's resume is to experience a feeling of inadequacy in assessing what one is reading, so esoteric is the subject matter. Current or former memberships include:

Board of Governors of the University of Chicago; Board of Trustees of the Midwest Research Institute; Consultant to the Office of Naval Research on anti-submarine warfare and oceanography; Board of Governors of the Agricultural Hall of Fame; Representative of the University of Illinois to the NASA-Ames Research Consortium and to the University Corporation for Academic Research; One of five persons on the Kansas City liaison committee for investigation of the Hyatt Hotel disaster; Chairman of Board of Directors, National Planning Council, Computer use in Education and Research; Director of the following companies: Boatmen's Bank of Kansas City; Kansas City Power and Light Company; Kansas City's Center for Business Innovation; and the J.C. Nichols Company (developer and owner of KC's famed Country Club Plaza). Dr. Russell is or has been a consultant to the following univerities: University of Delaware (computer management); Rutgers University (research management); and the University of Houston (graduate education).

Dr. Russell has been a member of the board of directors of Micro-Thermal Applications, Inc. and was a consultant both to Honeywell Corporation (Program Management) and to Texas Instruments, Inc. (solid state science), and a member of Westinghouse Corporation's Executive Advisory Council on Higher Education. In the midst of all this, he has also found time to be an avid golfer and has been a member of various golf and country clubs.

His fields of research interests include: solid state physics; materials science; nuclear propulsion and weapons effects; anti-submarine warfare and oceanography; research management; graduate student support and educated manpower; computer use in research and education; and energy consumption and energy resources.

After the Board of Curators announced Dr. Russell's hiring, the usual MU faculty suspects stepped forward, whining that no "search process" had been conducted, nor "search committees" empaneled, with six-figure budgets, to screen ten thousand resumes and find the best ManPerson, or WomanPerson, for the job.

Which is comic relief enough for a slow summer weekend afternoon, when column subjects had seemed as scarce as rainfall. I propose to answer the grave concerns of critical faculty members by raising a cold, frosty one to the new president of the University of Missouri, Dr. George Albert Russell.