Education: Miss Mac Steps Down

Some years ago Massachusetts went through one of its periodic tizzies over whether schoolmarms should be allowed to keep their jobs after getting married. Miss Mildred Helen McAfee, president of Wellesley College, was for treating each case on its merits. Said she: “Some jobs and some people can take on matrimony, and some cannot.” Last week, after three years of trying to combine her job and matrimony, pert “Miss Mac” decided to leave Wellesley and join her husband, the Rev. Dr. Douglas Horton, a leader in the Congregational Christian Churches, in New York. Explained Mrs. Horton: “As a team we can accomplish more than the sum of the accomplishments of each of us working separately.”

The Hortons were a team at this summer’s Assembly of the World Council of Churches in Amsterdam (Miss Mac was one of the few women speakers there) and the trip helped decide her to go into religious work, assisting her husband.

Wellesley girls at morning chapel last week sat in unhappy silence when the chairman of the trustees announced Miss Mac’s decision to resign—effective whenever a suitable replacement could be lined up for the job. Said Miss Mac in her letter of resignation: “I recommend [the presidency] with unrestrained enthusiasm . . . as stimulating and important as any position I know.”

In the 28 years since her graduation from Vassar, Miss Mac has known quite a few jobs, ranging from a teacher in grade school to wartime director of the WAVES (TIME, March 12, 1945). At 36, she was Wellesley’s second youngest president. University presidents, resigned to each other’s ponderous speeches, always perk up when trigger-quick Mildred McAfee Horton gets up to speak. Her best-known dictum justifying girls’ schools against the advocates of coeducation: “It is easier to be scholarly when the boy friend is an event rather than a habit.”