Dr. O. Myking Mehus was named as the seventh president of Winona State Teachers College. Mehus was a graduate of Augustana College in St. Paul and held a Ph.D. degree from the University of North Dakota.

He was a member of the social studies faculty of Northwest Missouri State College when he became a candidate for the Winona position. He was a believer in liberal causes, an activist, well ahead of his time in his thinking on social and political causes. He reorganized the Winona State faculty into seven academic divisions each headed by a person with a terminal degree in his academic field. While that organizational change is nothing new among colleges, it seemed a radical change to a faculty accustomed to the informal organizational approach of the normal old school.

Early in Mehus years came other evidences that Winona State was fast joining the ranks of the full -fledged four-year colleges. The old Teachers College degree, Bachelor of Education, was changed to Bachelor of Science reflecting the movement of more emphasis on subject matter in curriculum.

President Mehus resigned his position and left Winona in the spring of 1943 to accept a position as chief of the Vocational Rehabilitation and Education Division of the Veterans Administration in Kansas City.