Trustees of the two-campus progressive school voted unanimously for the 35-year-old attorney, who authored Vermont's personal income tax reform law under Gov. Hoff.

Witherspoon replaces Dr. Royce S. Pitkin as head of the school Pitkin founded 30 years ago. Plans for expansion with a third campus will include more than 1,000 students.

Witherspoon accepted and will begin work in July, according to a college spokesperson. He received a B.A. degree at Verford College, Pennsylvania, in 1956, attended the University of Paris as a Fulbright Scholar and the Princeton University Graduate School, Princeton, N.J., as a Bamford fellow in 1968.

He received a Doctor of Law degree in 1962 at the University of Chicago Law School, where he graduated with honors.

Witherspoon served as law clerk for U.S. Court of Appeals Judge Sterry R. Waterman until 1963 and practiced law in a Cleveland, Ohio, firm prior to the Hoff appointment.

As a close legislative and policy adviser to Hoff, Witherspoon wrote the senior citizens property tax and rent relief law, enacted this year, and the 25 percent of federal liability state income tax reform. This law brought a capital gains levy to state coffers for the first time in 1967.

Witherspoon

He also drafted an open land tax bill to give property tax relief to farmers in 1966, and initiated computer processing of state tax returns.

His taxing philosophy centered on the ability-to-pay concept and Witherspoon opposed a state sales tax in favor of combined increases of state income and splinter taxes.

As an idea man for Hoff, Witherspoon advised that administration lift the poll tax as a prerequisite to voting in Vermont and proposed a tax package which included sweeping property and school tax reforms.

In 1966 he lectured at the University of California, Berkeley.

He is a visiting professor of public policy at the Tuck School of Business Administration at Dartmouth College.

No salary was disclosed by the college spokesman.