Education: Five Sisters

(See front cover)

“Hello, how are you? Have a good summer?”

“Fine. Did you?”

“Fine.”

With minor variations, these immemorial greetings were exchanged millions of times last week as thousands of U. S. college students, to be followed by thousands more this week and next, went back to their books. Prime news of the college world was that the five-year drop in enrollments seemed to be checked. With returns incomplete, Eastern registrations were holding even with last year, whereas many a Western campus showed or was expecting a substantial increase.

Heartening to most campuses, the news was of small moment to five elderly, aristocratic spinster sisters in the East. At the top of their class, the sisters—Bryn Mawr, Mount Holyoke, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley—have had no trouble keeping at or very near their top limits of enrollment. Depression has not bothered them financially. They have long complained about the fact that their endowments average only one-tenth those of their men’s-college equivalents.. But what they had in 1929, invested ultra-conservatively, they have kept. No faculty salaries have been cut, no instructors dismissed for reasons of economy.

Vassar. Two miles back from the Hudson River on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie, N. Y. lies Vassar’s rolling, wooded, 900-acre campus. One day last week it suddenly came alive with young women in sports clothes hurrying along neat walks with bridge lamps, books, trash baskets, suitcases. Three hundred and seventy of them were freshmen. After supper they and 854 upperclassmen trooped into a red-roofed, Collegiate-Gothic chapel. There President Henry Noble MacCracken, his full, pink face looking some-what careworn, droned a mild message of greeting to the effect that while three-score years and ten is a respectable age for a human, it is mere childhood for an up & coming institution like Vassar.

Had a graduate of 1929 been back on Vassar’s campus last week she would have been struck first by physical changes—a half-million dollar gymnasium, an 18-hole golf course, four athletic fields, a Hall of Music. But as she talked with undergraduates and watched them about their work & play she would soon have detected a more important fact—five years of depression have done much to make rich Vassar girls serious and simple.

“I go for the best means, cost what they may, and corresponding prices in return,” said Matthew Vassar when he founded his Female College in 1861. Vassar is the costliest of women’s colleges. In 1931 it upped its charge for tuition, room & board from $1,000 to $1,200 per year, and no girl can get by on less than $150 for incidentals. But Vassar supplies 25% of its students with scholarships averaging $300 and last year it turned three dormitories into cooperative settlements where, by sweeping, scrubbing, waiting table and running errands, girls may help make their way.

Vassar girls have cut down on “social bats,” stopped importing expensive orchestras for their proms, and their parties for each other have become considerably fewer and less fancy. They have turned increasingly to cinemas, long walks, sports, dramatics, debating and other amusements of their own making.

Banned from Vassar’s campus are alcoholic beverages, student-owned automobiles. But the young women are free to drink discreetly in designated Poughkeepsie saloons, smoke almost anywhere they please, stay out late at night, get married while still undergraduates. With President MacCracken determined to make responsible adults of them, they have attained almost complete self-government. Campus potentates are the president of Student’s Association, the chief justice of Student’s Court.

Everyone from the president down agrees that Vassar girls are tackling their studies with more energy and purpose. Well-geared is Vassar’s administration to the current trend toward independent study. Any student may now get extra credit for reading, research or writing done in spare time or summer vacation, and high-ranking juniors and seniors are freed from most classroom requirements. Some critics think the papers in Vassar’s Journal of Undergraduate Studies stand up well beside many a graduate thesis. That they take to heart their responsibilities under the New Deal and the New Leisure, Vassar girls have proven by approximately doubling their enrollment in economics & social studies and fine arts. And that they mean to make their own small worlds better places to live in, they have shown by swarming to Vassar’s famed Institute of Euthenics, where babies, dresses, furniture and foods are brought into the laboratory.

Surveying his Vassar domain, Henry Noble MacCracken, 53, can say: “Under favorable conditions and proper guidance we have found the American student to be characterized by self-control, reliability, persistence and tolerance.” His tolerant charges in turn watch him play tennis with freshmen, dance with sophomores, romp in the annual costume baseball game between students & faculty, dress up to take the part of an ancient Greek citizen or Hindu prince in a college play—and find him pre-eminently worthy of respect, admiration, affection.

Still fond of English, his old specialty, President MacCracken teaches a freshman Education course which consists largely of lessons from his own College Chaucer. He has traveled widely, worked hard to promote international friendship through student exchanges. An ardent Democrat, President MacCracken is a warm friend of his college’s great & good neighbor and trustee, President Roosevelt.

Having surveyed Vassar, the observer who traveled on last week to Wellesley, Mount Holyoke, Smith and Bryn Mawr would have found that the years since 1929 had in general treated the five sisters alike—bringing a greater scholastic seriousness and independence, a simpler and more self-reliant social life, an easing of campus restrictions, a virtually doubled enrollment in economics, social studies and fine arts. But he would have been rash as well as obtuse if he had forthwith concluded that the sisters are all alike.

Wellesley last week welcomed its largest entering class since 1925—446 freshmen. They will not, as in times past, learn that coat-hangers must be placed with hooks all pointing the same way, ready for a single swoop of removal. But Wellesley has not forgotten its Great Fire of 1914. When she hears a fire bell, a Wellesley girl automatically slips on shoes and heavy coat, grabs her most valuable possession and runs against time for her fire station.

Wellesley is this year charging students $500 instead of $600 for room & board, $500 instead of $400 for tuition. During Depression the college has added $2,500,000 to its endowment, acquired a majestic new administration building named Hetty Green Hall, a zoology laboratory, another co-operative dormitory and the beginnings of a physics & chemistry building which will be completed next autumn. All these are part of President Ellen Fitz Pendleton’s longtime campaign to construct a handsome, Collegiate-Gothic “New Wellesley” out of the ashes of 1914. Now 70 and beginning her 23rd year as president, shy, deliberate, precise “Pres-Penn” intends to see the program through. She wants three more residence halls, an infirmary and additions to art building, gymnasium and library. No Wellesley woman doubts that she will get them, but many have long wondered if some of the building money could not be better spent on faculty salaries. Unlike Smith, Vassar and Bryn Mawr, Wellesley does not claim that its faculty is on a par with those of first-rate men’s colleges.

Wellesley yields to none, however, in democracy. Although only about 10% of its students need to work for their college living, it is a proud Wellesley boast that by her campus dress the tycoon’s daughter cannot be told from the clerk’s daughter. Fashions run to inexpensive sports clothes and low-heeled shoes, with hare legs & socks much in evidence this year. Lest snobbery or cliquishness raise its head. Wellesley charges the same for all dormitory rooms, assigns them by lot. Priding itself on a well-rounded life, Wellesley is inclined to think Bryn Mawr and Mount Holyoke rather grindish. Smith and Vassar a bit too social. A song often heard on chapel steps:

Give to Bryn Mawr her library and knowledge,

Give to the Smith girls society and pep,

But give to the true-hearted daughter of Wellesley College,

The song she likes to sing on the old chapel step.

Mount Holyoke, at small South Hadley, Mass. (pop. 6,773), last week began its 34th year under the presidency of Mary Emma Woolley, 71, famed feminist and warrior for peace who crowned her labors in 1932 as the only U. S. woman delegate to the unsuccessful Geneva Disarmament Conference. Standing erect and impressive in academic gown before 226 freshmen and 704 upperclassmen, large, florid President Woolley announced: “Cynicism and pessimism are oldfashioned, as oldfashioned, I suspect, as human nature itself.”

Mount Holyoke, which made testy gentlemen snort “rib factory” and “Protestant nunnery” when famed Mary Lyon founded it in 1837, is the eldest and most retiring of the five sisters. Always studious, always hard up, its students have been little changed by Depression. They dress drably and, under the large, stern shadow of Mary Emma Woolley, lead rather drab lives. There is no cinema house in South Hadley; the pictures President Woolley brings to the college are usually old, often dull. This year girls may smoke at specified times and places, a major concession on the part of Miss Woolley who has long believed that “no lady would smoke.” Mount Holyoke girls feel a profound respect for Miss Woolley and are proud to have her as their president, but they are a little tired of hearing about disarmament.

Bryn Mawr. About three-fourths of the 350,000-odd U. S. college women attend co-educational institutions. There, say advocates of coeducation, they gain poise and maturity in a normal environment. There, say champions of separate colleges, they are distracted and dominated by men, miss the separate college’s stimulus to leadership and a vigorous intellectual life. Says President Marion Edwards Park of Bryn Mawr: “Segregation at the college age doesn’t hurt a bit. It teaches an appreciation of each other sadly lacking in women who have no chance to see their sex in control. The absence of sexual and social pressure is an intellectual advantage rather than a liability.”

Long on intellect is Bryn Mawr. Youngest and smallest of the sister colleges, it is the only one which grants the Ph.D. degree, is proud of a faculty capable of such advanced instruction. Twelve miles out on Philadelphia’s socialite Main Line, Bryn Mawr’s prim, cloister-like campus last week lay nearly deserted. This year’s session of its famed Summer School for Women Workers in Industry ended last July, and the college was not to open until Oct. 1. Then officials expected about the usual number of students—300-odd undergraduates, 100-odd postgraduates. Of the undergraduates about one fifth will be well-groomed Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore socialites who will clique together on the campus, “come out” during their college careers. The rest will be mostly healthy, normal girls from well-to-do U. S. homes. Their campus appearance lately prompted the Bryn Mawr College News to declare: “Clothes might be sent to the cleaners, buttons might be sewn on and hair might be brushed without any serious reflection being cast on the Bryn Mawr intellect.”

Smith. In Education last June Constance M. McCullough of University of Minnesota, having quizzed 100 private girls’ schools and 100 public high schools, inferred that Smith, Vassar, Bryn Mawr and their sisters are snob colleges. Her evidence: only 15% of Bryn Mawr’s freshmen are admitted directly from public schools; only 20% of Vassar’s, 25% of Smith’s.

“Completely erroneous,” snapped Smith’s Dean Marjorie Hope Nicolson in the same issue, is the idea that Smith and her sisters discriminate against public school products. Miss McCullough’s error lay in overlooking the increasing number of girls who attend both private and public secondary schools. Half of Smith’s present senior class attended public school all or part of the time, and in lower classes the proportion is even larger.

Plopped behind a fence in the centre of Northampton, Mass., with many an old and ugly red brick building studding its wide, green lawns, Smith foots its sisterly class in beauty of architecture. But Smith girls are not envious. Smart though not notably intellectual, they study hard under a first-rate, liberal, largely male faculty, end their four years with well-furnished minds. They play equally hard—tennis, boating on Paradise Pond, singing in glee club, producing experimental plays and operas. At the cinema their hearts, like those of a million shopgirls, beat hardest for ruffianly Clark Gable. Since 1929 they have come to enjoy, without abusing, the privileges of smoking, drinking, motoring with men after dark. Smith proms, though far less elaborate than formerly, are still ranked top by most Eastern college men. Perhaps because it is the largest of the sister colleges (some 2,200 students were expected on opening day this week), Smith seems to many an observer to be the least-typed, best-rounded of the lot.

All Smith girls are devoted to a grey-goateed, twinkly little Scotsman who as a boy ate porridge morning & evening and has had chronic indigestion ever since. He is William Allan Neilson, president of Smith since 1917, famed literary scholar, stanch liberal, editor-in-chief of the latest Webster’s Dictionary. At 65 President Neilson is wise and witty, still likes to tease his tall, handsome German wife, look into almost everything that goes on in Northampton and the world.