Education: Quakeress with a Quota

Barnard College for women, the poor, proud relation of Columbia University (endowment: $75 million) was out to improve its financial lot. Barnard, whose red brick buildings of institutional classic stand along Manhattan’s upper Broadway, only a stone’s throw from Columbia’s city campus, has an academic reputation which only such women’s colleges as Vassar, Wellesley and Bryn Mawr can equal, and a faculty (borrowing from Columbia’s) that most others cannot. But last year, asking no more tuition ($700) than most other top schools, Barnard (endowment: $5,000,000) operated at a $136,166 deficit.

Before starting out for more money, Barnard took steps to live within its present income. Resident students (about a third of the total) got a polite ultimatum: do your own housekeeping chores or pay more rent. The girls voted to do the chores. At the same time they were told that Dean Millicent Carey Mclntosh was taking an informal leave of absence, would put in her time scouting up $5,000,000.*

Raising money for any liberal arts school in a scientific age is hard enough; raising it for a women’s college, as Dean Mclntosh knows, is the limit. As a male educator once put it: “When a man wants to leave money to his college, he leaves it. When a woman wants to leave money to her college, she finds that her late husband has tied up her money in a trust fund so that she can’t make a fool of herself.”

Living & Learning. Dean Mclntosh will bring to the task a calm flair for managing things. She comes of a Quaker family, went to Bryn Mawr when her aunt, Dr. M. Carey Thomas, was president. After a year at Cambridge, she took her Ph.D. in English at Johns Hopkins.

Back at Bryn Mawr she worked up to acting dean of the college, moved on in 1930, to become headmistress of Manhattan’s Brearley School. In 1932, she married Dr. Rustin Mclntosh, director of the Babies Hospital at Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center, bore five children without breaking her career for more than a few months at a time.

In 1947, on the retirement of Dean Virginia Gildersleeve, Millicent Mclntosh was appointed dean of Barnard. She inherited a heads-up academic program which seemed stiff-necked to some, but which struck a sound middle ground between progressive and traditional methods. Mrs. Mclntosh has made few changes, emphasizes that the main business of a college education is to bridge the gap between “learning and living.”

The bridge is in danger of falling, she thinks, because one of its chief supports, the teacher, is badly undermined. “People think of a teacher as a devoted, cultured spinster who expects nothing in return . . . or some unmarried, retiring don who needs only enough to buy his port. Why, they pay their secretaries more than my top teachers get.”

“Women Should Realize.” Dean Mclntosh also has a bone to pick with the idea that a woman who is “only going to get married” doesn’t need college. “Women should realize their own power and influence in the creation of the community and the home . . . It’s ridiculous to give a man a very specialized training, and then expect him to do a good job, if the woman he marries ruins his life.”

This is the first time 50-year-old Dean Mclntosh has ever tried to raise big money; but, as a friend remarked: “Any woman who can raise five children with one hand can raise five million with two.” Among her alumnae she will find prosperous prospects, and a few who can help her with the fund-raising publicity. Among them: Mrs. Eugene (Washington Post) Meyer, ’07; Mrs. Arthur Hays (New York Times) Sulzberger, ’14; Mrs. Ogden (New York Herald Tribune) Reid, ’03.

*She will have plenty of competition: Wellesley is currently trying to raise $7,500,000; Smith, $7,000,000; Bryn Mawr and Mt. Holyoke, $2,000,000 each; Radcliffe, $1,000,000.