ST. CLOUD -- St. Cloud State University is celebrating its sesquicentennial this year. Once a month Archivist Tom Steman comes on the News @ Noon Show on WJON to talk about the long history of the school. Tuesday the topic was the school's presidents.

There have been just 24 presidents in the 150 years. Steman says just two of them were not born in the United States.

They were all born in the U.S. except for Brendan McDonald who is Canadian and Ashish Vaidya who was born in India.

The first "president" was Ira Moore, he actually held the title of "principal", from 1869 until 1875.

Just four of the presidents also graduated from St. Cloud, including Brendan McDonald who held the position from 1982 until 1992.

It was very important to Brendan McDonald, it was that connection of where he met is his wife, his connections to St. Cloud State, and he played hockey here.

Sue Prout served as an executive assistant to the president beginning with McDonald through some of Earl Potter's term. Under McDonald, enrollment at SCSU hit a high in 1990 with over 17,000 students. Division I hockey also became a reality under McDonald.

The other three alums who went on to lead the school were Thomas Gray from 1884 until 1890, Waite Shoemaker from 1902 until 1916, and George Selke from 1927 until 1946.

Twenty-one of the presidents have been men, with two "interim" female presidents and of course, the first "permanent" female president is the current president Robbyn Wacker.

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