Education: McBride to Bryn Mawr

Bryn Mawr College followed Bryn Mawr tradition and last week chose a scholar to be its fourth president: Alumna Katharine Elizabeth McBride, who at 37 became one of the youngest college presidents in the U.S.

Katharine (“Kay”) McBride faces a formidable intellectual tradition, personified in the minds of Bryn Mawr women in the fearsome figure of the college’s second president, the late, great Dr. M. Carey Thomas. Still the most intellectual U.S. women’s college, one of the toughest for a girl to get into and stay in, Bryn Mawr retains the stamp of Dr. Thomas although she retired 20 years ago.

Indomitable Dr. Thomas made the trustees of Johns Hopkins admit her by a special vote to their graduate Greek Department. Later she stormed her way into the Universities of Leipzig (where, as the only woman, she had to sit behind a screen at lectures) and Gottingen; then, refused a Ph.D., went to Zurich to get one. She took charge of Bryn Mawr in 1894, ten years after its founding, ran it with an iron hand until 1922.

President Thomas instituted special en trance examinations for Bryn Mawr (which she took care to make tougher than Harvard’s), made every matriculant show that she had mastered four years of Latin, put her girls through an ordeal by fire called “orals” (oral tests in French and German), decreed that every girl must read at least two hours every night before going to bed.

Today, after 20 years under Miss Thomas’ easier-going successor, Marion Edwards Park, Bryn Mawr has College Entrance Boards instead of special exams, written tests in languages (Spanish and Italian are now permitted) instead of the dread “orals.” But Bryn Mawr is still an intellectual institution; Dr. Park, like Dr. Thomas, believed that “The country needs good minds.”

No such dragon as Dr. Thomas is Katharine McBride. Tall, low-voiced, self-effacing, Miss McBride is a quiet research scholar in neurology. She got three degrees at Bryn Mawr (B.A., M.A., Ph.D.), steps up to Bryn Mawr’s presidency from the deanship of Radcliffe. But from Bryn Mawr, Dr. Thomas and Dr. Park, Miss McBride acquired a profound respect for scholarship. Said she last week: “One of the things I like best about Bryn Mawr is that they expect scholarly work of the students. . . . [Such] students . . . seem much better equipped . . to live in a world of changes like this today.”