President J. B. George of State Teachers College Hattiesburg, Miss., may occasionally run a practiced eye along the floors of the college halls. If he does, it is caused by force of habit that has lingered more than 20 years. In 1915 Freshman J. B. George modestly started his State Teachers College career in flurries of dust and dirt. He swept campus halls, dug up campus stumps, and hoped for nothing more from the college than a diploma thoroughly earned.

J. B. George travelled this route of cheerful drudgery until the Mississippi school graduated him a promising scholar eight years later. He was remembered after George Peabody College in Nashville gave him a more genteely-earned M.A. and Ph.D. degrees. He returned to State Teachers College at Hattiesburg with the rack of professor, and in 14 years made the climb to the presidency.

Dr. George is the only alumnus of a Mississippi state-operated educational institution who is an alumnus of the college he heads. For the past five years he has directed the activities in the halls he once swept and on the campus into which he once dug deeply as scholar and laborer.