Herman B Wells; Former Indiana University President

Herman B Wells, 97, popular Indiana University president and chancellor who led the school through spectacular growth and helped integrate Big Ten athletics. Wells, who graduated from Indiana in 1924, was named the university’s acting president for the 1937-38 school year at age 35. He was appointed the university’s 12th president in 1938 and served until 1962. He also served as interim president briefly in 1968 and had been chancellor since leaving the president’s office. Wells oversaw the growth of the school from a pre-World War II campus of about 9,000 students to a major institution that had grown to more than 20,000 students by the 1960s. The main campus in Bloomington now has about 34,000 students; an additional 56,000 are enrolled at seven other campuses.

Wells ended segregation at tables in the Indiana Memorial Union, and in 1948 helped integrate Big Ten athletics by quietly urging basketball coach Branch McCracken to recruit Bill Garrett, the first black to play a varsity sport in the conference. Rotund and white-haired for much of his life, Wells each December for many years appeared in the Indiana Daily Student newsroom and other campus venues dressed as Santa Claus. Intensely interested in international affairs, Wells was appointed a special advisor on liberated areas for the State Department and was a member of the Allied missions for observation of Greek elections at the end of World War II. In 1957, President Dwight D. Eisenhower appointed Wells as a delegate to the 12th General Assembly of the United Nations. On Saturday in Bloomington.