THE FACULTY AND THEIR METHODS
I.
At Wellesley, to a degree unusual in American colleges, whether
for men or women, the faculty determine the general policy of the
college. The president, as chairman of the Academic Council,
is in a very real and democratic sense the representative of the
faculty, not the ruler. In Miss Freeman's day, the excellent
presidential habit of consulting with the heads of departments
was formed, and many of the changes instituted by the young president
were suggested and formulated by her older colleagues. In
Miss Shafer's day, habit had become precedent, and she would be
the first to point out that the "new curriculum" which will always
be associated with her name, was really the achievement of the
Academic Council and the departments, working through patient years
to adjust, develop, and balance the minutest details in their
composite plan.
The initiative on the part of the faculty has been exerted chiefly
along academic lines, but in some instances it has necessitated
important emendations of the statutes; and that the trustees were
willing to alter the statutes on the request of the faculty would
indicate the friendly confidence felt toward the innovators.
In the statutes of Wellesley College, as printed in 1885, we read
that "The College was founded for the glory of God and the service
of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women.
"In order to the attainment of these ends, it is required that every
Trustee, Teacher, and Officer, shall be a member of an Evangelical
church, and that the study of the Holy Scriptures shall be pursued
by every student throughout the entire College course under the
direction of the Faculty."
In the early nineties, pressure from members of the faculty,
themselves members of Evangelical churches, induced the trustees
to alter the religious requirement for teachers; and the reorganization
of the Department of Bible Study a few years later resulted in
a drastic change in the requirements for students.
As printed in 1898, the statutes read, "To realize this design it
is required that every Trustee shall be a member in good standing
of some Evangelical Church; that every teacher shall be of decided
Christian character and influence, and in manifest sympathy with
the religious spirit and aim with which the College was founded;
and that the study of the Sacred Scriptures by every student shall
extend over the first three years, with opportunities for elective
studies in the same during the fourth year."
But it was found that freshmen were not mature enough to study
to the best advantage the new courses in Biblical Criticism, and
the statutes as printed in 1912 record still another amendment:
"And that the study of the Sacred Scriptures by every student
shall extend over the second and third years, with opportunities
for elective studies in the same during the fourth year."
These changes are the more pleasantly significant, since all actual
power, at Wellesley as at most other colleges, resides with the
trustees if they choose to use it. They "have control of the college
and all its property, and of the investment and appropriation of
its funds, in conformity with the design of its establishment and
with the act of incorporation." They have "power to make and
execute such statutes and rules as they may consider needful for
the best administration of their trust, to appoint committees from
their own number, or of those not otherwise connected with the
college, and to prescribe their duties and powers." It is theirs
to appoint "all officers of government or instruction and all
employees needed for the administration of the institution whose
appointment is not otherwise provided for." They determine the
duties and salaries of officers and employees and may remove,
either with or without notice, any person whom they have appointed.
In being governed undemocratically from without by a self-perpetuating
body of directors, Wellesley is of course no worse off than the
majority of American colleges. But that a form of college government
so patently and unreasonably autocratic should have generated so
little friction during forty years, speaks volumes for the
broadmindedness, the generous tolerance, and the Christian
self-control of both faculty and trustees. If, in matters financial,
the trustees have been sometimes unwilling to consider the scruples
of groups of individuals on the faculty, along lines of economic
morals, they have nevertheless taken no official steps to suppress
the expression of such scruples. They have withstood any reactionary
pressure from individuals of their board, and have always allowed
the faculty entire academic freedom. In matters pertaining to
the college classes, they are usually content to ratify the
appointments on the faculty, and approve the alterations in the
curriculum presented to them by the president of the college; and
the president, in turn, leaves the professors and their associates
remarkably free to choose and regulate the personnel and the
courses in the departments.
In this happy condition of affairs, the alumnae trustees undoubtedly
play a mediating part, for they understand the college from within
as no clergyman, financier, philanthropist,--no graduate of a
man's college--can hope to, be he never so enthusiastic and
well-meaning in the cause of woman's education. But so long as
the faculty are excluded from direct representation on the board,
the situation will continue to be anomalous. For it is not too
sweeping to assert that Wellesley's development and academic
standing are due to the cooperative wisdom and devoted scholarship
of her faculty. The initiative has been theirs. They have proved
that a college for women can be successfully taught and administered
by women. To them Wellesley owes her academic status.
From the beginning, women have predominated on the Wellesley
faculty. The head of the Department of Music has always been a
man, but he had no seat upon the Academic Council until 1896.
In 1914-1915, of the twenty-eight heads of departments, three
were men, the professors of Music, of Education, and of French.
Of the thirty-nine professors and associate professors, not heads
of departments, five were men; of the fifty-nine instructors, ten
were men. It is interesting to note that there were no men in the
departments of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry,
Astronomy, Biblical History, Italian, Spanish, Reading and Speaking,
Art, and Archaeology, during the academic year 1914-1915.
Critics sometimes complain of the preponderance of women upon
Wellesley's faculty, but her policy in this respect has been
deliberate. Every woman's college is making its own experiments,
and the results achieved at Wellesley indicate that a faculty made
up largely of women, with a woman at its head, in no way militates
against high academic standards, sound scholarship, and efficient
administration. That a more masculine faculty would also have
peculiar advantages, she does not deny.
From the collegiate point of view, this feminine faculty is a very
well mixed body, for it includes representative graduates from the
other women's colleges, and from the more important coeducational
colleges and state universities, as well as men from Harvard and
Brown. The Wellesley women on the faculty are an able minority;
but it is the policy of the college to avoid academic in-breeding
and to keep the Wellesley influence a minority influence. Of the
twenty-eight heads of departments, five--the professors of English
Literature, Chemistry, Pure Mathematics, Biblical History, and
Physics--are Wellesley graduates, three of them from the celebrated
class of '80. Of the thirty-nine professors and associate professors,
in 1914-1915, ten were alumnae of Wellesley, and of the fifty-nine
instructors, seventeen. Since 1895, when Professor Stratton was
appointed dean to assist Mrs. Irvine, Wellesley has had five deans,
but only Miss Pendleton, who held the office under Miss Hazard
from 1901 to 1911, has been a graduate of Wellesley. Miss Coman,
who assisted Miss Hazard for one year only, and Miss Chapin, who
consented to fill the office after Miss Pendleton's appointment to
the presidency until a permanent dean could be chosen, were both
graduates of the University of Michigan. Dean Waite, who succeeded
to the office in 1913, is an alumna of Smith College, and has been
a member of the Department of English at Wellesley since 1896.
II.
Only the women who have helped to promote and establish the higher
education of women can know how exciting and romantic it was to be
a professor in a woman's college during the last half-century.
To be a teacher was no new thing for a woman; the dame school
is an ancient institution; all down the centuries, in classic
villas, in the convents of the Middle Ages, in the salons of the
eighteenth century, learned ladies with a pedagogic instinct have
left their impress upon the intellectual life of their times. But
the possibility that women might be intellectually and physically
capable of sharing equally with men the burdens and the joys of
developing and directing the scholarship of the race had never been
seriously considered until the nineteenth century. The women who
came to teach in the women's colleges in the '70's and '80's and
'90's knew themselves on trial in the eyes of the world as never
women had been before. And they brought to that trial the heady
enthusiasm and radiant exhilaration and fiery persistence which
possess all those who rediscover learning and drink deep. They
knew the kind of selfless inspiration Wyclif knew when he was
translating the Bible into the language of England's common people.
They shared the elation and devotion of Erasmus and his fellows.
To plan a curriculum in which the humanities and the sciences
should every one be given a fair chance; to distinguish intelligently
between the advantages of the elective system and its disadvantages;
to decide, without prejudice, at what points the education of the
girl should differ or diverge from the education of the boy; to
try out the pedagogic methods of the men's colleges and discover
which were antiquated and should be abolished, which were susceptible
of reform, which were sound; to invent new methods,--these were
the romantic quests to which these enamored devotees were vowed, and
to which, through more than half a century, they have been faithful.
Wellesley's student laboratory for experimental work in physics,
established 1878, was preceded in New England only by the student
laboratory of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Her
laboratory for work in experimental psychology, established by
Professor Calkins in 1891, was the first in any women's college
in the country, and one of the first in any college. In 1886, the
American School of Classical Studies at Athens invited Wellesley
to become one of the cooperating colleges to sustain this school
and to enjoy its advantages. The invitation came quite unsolicited,
and was the first extended to a woman's college.
The schoolmen developing and expanding their Trivium and Quadrivium
at Oxford, Paris, Bologna, experienced no keener intellectual delights
than did their belated sisters of Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Wellesley.
But in order to understand the passion of their point of view,
we must remember that the higher education for which the women
of the nineteenth century were enthusiastic was distinctly an
education along scholarly and intellectual lines; this early and
original meaning of the term "higher education", this original and
distinguishing function of the woman's college, are in danger of
being blurred and lost sight of to-day by a generation that knew
not Joseph. The zeal with which the advocates of educational
and domestic training are trying to force into the curricula of
women's colleges courses on housekeeping, home-making, dressmaking,
dairy farming, to say nothing of stenography, typewriting, double
entry, and the musical glasses minus Shakespeare, is for the most
part unintelligible to the women who have given their lives to the
upbuilding of such colleges as Bryn Mawr, Smith, Mt. Holyoke,
Vassar, and Wellesley,--not because they minimize the civilizing
value of either homemakers or business women in a community, or
fail to recognize their needs, but simply because women's colleges
were never intended to meet those needs.
When we go to the Metropolitan Museum of Fine Arts, we do not
complain because it lacks the characteristics of the Smithsonian
Institute, or of the Boston Horticultural Show. We are content
that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology should differ in
scope from Harvard University; yet some of us, college graduates
even, seem to have an uneasy feeling that Wellesley and Bryn Mawr
may not be ministering adequately to life, because they do not
add to their curricular activities the varied aims of an
Agricultural College, a Business College, a School of Philanthropy,
and a Cooking School, with required courses on the modifying of
milk for infants. Great institutions for vocational training, such
as Pratt Institute in Brooklyn and Simmons College in Boston,
have a dignity and a usefulness which no one disputes. Undoubtedly
America needs more of their kind. But to impair the dignity and
usefulness of the colleges dedicated to the higher education of
women by diluting their academic programs with courses on business
or domesticity will not meet that need. The unwillingness of
college faculties to admit vocational courses to the curriculum is
not due to academic conservatism and inability to march with
the times, but to an unclouded and accurate conception of the
meaning of the term "higher education."
But definiteness of aim does not necessarily imply narrowness
of scope. The Wellesley Calendar for 1914-1915 contains a list
of three hundred and twelve courses on thirty-two subjects, exclusive
of the gymnasium practice, dancing, swimming, and games required
by the Department of Hygiene. Of these subjects, four are ancient
languages and their literatures, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Sanskrit.
Seven are modern languages and their literatures, German, French,
Italian, Spanish, and English Literature, Composition, and Language.
Ten are sciences, Mathematics, pure and applied, Astronomy, Physics,
Chemistry, Geology, Geography, Botany, Zoology and Physiology,
Hygiene. Seven are scientifically concerned with the mental and
spiritual evolution of the human race, Biblical and Secular History,
Economics, Education, Logic, Psychology, and Philosophy. Four
may be classified as arts: Archaeology, Art, including its history,
Music, and Reading and Speaking, which old-fashioned people still
call Elocution.
From this wide range of subjects, the candidates for the B.A.
degree are required to take one course in Mathematics, the prescribed
freshman course; one course in English Composition, prescribed for
freshmen; courses in Biblical History and Hygiene; a modern
language, unless two modern languages have been presented for
admission; two natural sciences before the junior year, unless
one has already been offered for admission, in which case one is
required, and a course in Philosophy, which the student should
ordinarily take before her senior year.
These required studies cover about twenty of the fifty-nine hours
prescribed for the degree; the remaining hours are elective; but
the student must group her electives intelligently, and to this end
she must complete either nine hours of work in each of two
departments, or twelve hours in one department and six in a
second; she must specialize within limits.
It will be evident on examining this program that no work is
required in History, Economics, English Literature and Language,
Comparative Philology, Education, Archaeology, Art, Reading and
Speaking, and Music. All the courses in these departments are
free electives. Just what led to this legislation, only those who
were present at the decisive discussions of the Academic Council
can know. Possibly they have discovered by experience that young
women do not need to be coaxed or coerced into studying the arts;
that they gravitate naturally to those subjects which deal with
human society, such as History, Economics, and English Literature;
and that the specialist can be depended upon to elect, without
pressure, courses in Philology or Pedagogy.
But little effort has been made at Wellesley, so far, to attract
graduate students. In this respect she differs from Bryn Mawr.
She offers very few courses planned exclusively for college
graduates, but opens her advanced courses in most departments to
both seniors and graduates. This does not mean, however, that
the graduate work is not on a sound basis. Wellesley has not yet
exercised her right to give the Doctor's degree, but expert
testimony, outside the college, has declared that some of the
Master's theses are of the doctorial grade in quality, if not in
quantity; and the work for the Master's degree is said to be more
difficult and more severely scrutinized than in some other colleges
where the Doctor's degree is made the chief goal of the graduate student.
The college has in its gift the Alice Freeman Palmer Fellowship,
founded in 1903 by Mrs. David P. Kimball of Boston, and yielding
an income of about one thousand dollars. The holder must be a
woman, a graduate of Wellesley or some other American college of
approved standing; she must be "not more than twenty-six years of
age at the time of her appointment, unmarried throughout the whole
of her tenure, and as free as possible from other responsibilities."
She may hold the fellowship for one year only, but "within three
years from entrance on the fellowship she must present to the
faculty a thesis embodying the results of the research carried on
during the period of tenure."
Wellesley is proud of her Alice Freeman Palmer Fellows. Of the
eleven who have held the Fellowship between 1904 and 1915, four
are Wellesley graduates, Helen Dodd Cook, whose subject was
Philosophy; Isabelle Stone, working in Greek; Gertrude Schopperle,
in Comparative Literature; Laura Alandis Hibbard, in English
Literature. Two are from Radcliffe, and one each from Cornell,
Vassar, the University of Dakota, Ripon, and Goucher. The Fellow
is left free to study abroad, in an American college or university,
or to use the income for independent research. The list of
universities at which these young women have studied is as impressive
as it is long. It includes the American Schools for Classical
Studies at Athens and Rome; the universities of Gottingen, Wurzburg,
Munich, Paris, and Cambridge, England; and Yale, Johns Hopkins,
and the University of Chicago.
This is not the place in which to give a detailed account of the
work of each one of Wellesley's academic departments. Any intelligent
person who turns the pages of the official calendar may easily
discover that the standard of admission and the requirements for
the degree of Bachelor of Arts place Wellesley in the first rank
among American colleges, whether for men or for women. But every
woman's college, besides conforming to the general standard, is
making its own contribution to the higher education of women.
At Wellesley, the methods in certain departments have gained a
deservedly high reputation.
The Department of Art, under Professor Alice V.V. Brown, formerly
of the Slater Museum of Norwich, Connecticut, is doing a work in
the proper interpretation and history of art as unique as it is
valuable. The laboratory method is used, and all students are
required to recognize and indicate the characteristic qualities
and attributes of the great masters and the different schools of
paintings by sketching from photographs of the pictures studied.
These five and ten minute sketches by young girls, the majority of
whom have had no training in drawing, are remarkable for the
vivacity and accuracy with which they reproduce the salient
features of the great paintings. The students are of course given
the latest results of the modern school of art criticism. In
addition to the work with undergraduates, the department offers
courses to graduate students who wish to prepare themselves for
curatorships, or lectureships in art museums, and Wellesley women
occupy positions of trust in the Metropolitan Museum in New York,
in the Boston Art Museum, in museums in Chicago, Worcester, and
elsewhere. The "Short History of Italian Painting" by Professor
Brown and Mr. William Rankin is a standard authority.
The Department of Music, working quite independently of the
Department of Art, has also adapted laboratory methods to its own
ends with unusual results. Under Professor Hamilton C. Macdougall,
the head of the department, and Associate Professor Clarence G.
Hamilton, courses in musical interpretation have been developed
in connection with the courses in practical music. The first-year
class, meeting once a week, listens to an anonymous musical
selection played by one of its members, and must decide by internal
evidence--such as simple cadences, harmonic figuration as applied
to the accompaniment and other characteristics--upon the school
of the composer, and biographical data. The analysis of the
musical selection and the reasons for her decision are set down
in her notebook by the listening student. The second-year class
concerns itself with "the thematic and polyphonic melody, the
larger forms, harmony in its aesthetic bearings, the aesthetic
effects of the more complicated rhythms, comparative criticism
and the various schools of composition."
These valuable contributions to method and scope in the study of
the History of Art and the History of Music are original with
Wellesley, and are distinctly a part of her history.
Among the departments which carry prestige outside the college
walls are those of Philosophy and Psychology, English Literature,
and German. Wellesley's Department of English Literature is
unusually fortunate in having as interpreters of the great literature
of England a group of women of letters of established reputation.
What Longfellow, Lowell, Norton, were to the Harvard of their day,
Katharine Lee Bates, Vida D. Scudder, Sophie Jewett, and Margaret
Sherwood are to the Wellesley of their day and ours. Working
together, with unfailing enthusiasm for their subjects, and keen
insight into the cultural needs of American girls, they have built
up their department on a sure foundation of accurate scholarship
and tested pedagogic method. At a time when the study of literature
threatened to become, almost universally, an exercise in the dry
rot of philological terms, in the cataloguing of sources, or the
analyzing of literary forms, the department at Wellesley continued
unswervingly to make use of philology, sources, and even art forms,
as means to an end; that end the interpretation of literary epochs,
the illumination of intellectual and spiritual values in literary
masterpieces, the revelation of the soul of poet, dramatist,
essayist, novelist. No teaching of literature is less sentimental
than the teaching at Wellesley, and no teaching is more quickening
to the imagination. Now that the method of accumulated detail
"about it and about it", is being defeated by its own aridity,
Wellesley's firm insistence upon listening to literature as to
a living voice is justified of her teachers and her students.
Indications of the reputation achieved by Wellesley's methods
of teaching German are found in the increasing numbers of students
who come to the college for the sake of the work in the German
Department, and in the fact that teachers' agencies not infrequently
ask candidates for positions if they are familiar with the Wellesley
methods. In an address before the New Hampshire State Teachers'
Association, in 1913, Professor Muller describes the aims and
ideals of her department as they took shape under the constructive
leadership of her predecessor, Professor Wenckebach, and as they
have been modified and developed in later years to meet the needs
of American students.
"Cinderella became a princess and a ruler over night," says Professor
Muller, "that is, German suddenly took the position in our college
that it has held ever since. Such a result was due not merely to
methods, of course, but first of all to the strong and enthusiastic
personality that was identified with them, and that was the main
secret of the unusual effectiveness of Fraulein Wenckebach's teaching.
"But this German professor had not only live methods and virile
personal qualities to help her along; she also had what a great
many of the foreign language teachers in this country must as yet
do without, that is, the absolute confidence, warm appreciation,
and financial support of an enlightened administration. President
Freeman and the trustees seem to have done practically everything
that their intrepid professor of German asked for. They not only
saw that all equipments needed... were provided, but they also
generously stipulated, at Fraulein Wenckebach's urgent request,
that all the elementary and intermediate classes in the foreign
language departments should be kept small, that is, that they
should not exceed fifteen. If Fraulein Wenckebach had been
obliged, as many modern language teachers still are, to teach
German to classes of from thirty to forty students; if she had
met in the administration of Wellesley College with as little
appreciation and understanding of the fine art and extreme difficulty
of foreign language work as high school teachers, for instance,
often encounter, her efforts could not possibly have been crowned
with success.
"Another agent in enabling Fraulein Wenckebach to do such fine
constructive work with her Department was the general Wellesley
policy, still followed, I am happy to say, of centralizing all
power and responsibility regarding department affairs in the person
of the head of the Department. Centralization may not work well
in politics, but a foreign language department working with the
reformed methods could not develop the highest efficiency under
any other form of government. With a living organism, such as
a foreign language department should be, there ought to be one,
and only one, responsible person to keep her finger on the pulse
of things--otherwise disintegration and ineffectiveness of the
work as a whole is sure to follow."
Professor Muller goes on to say, "Now JOY, genuine joy, in their
work, based on good, strong, mental exercise, is what we want
and what on the whole we get from our students. It was so in the
days of Fraulein Wenckebach and is so now, I am happy to say--and
not in the literature courses only, but in our elementary drill
work as well.
"It may be of interest to note that our elementary work and also
the advanced work in grammar and idiom are at present taught by
Americans wholly. I have come to the conclusion that well-trained
Americans gifted with vivid personalities get better results along
those lines than the average teacher of foreign birth and breeding."
Even in the elementary courses, only those texts are used which
illustrate German life, literature, and history; and the advanced
electives are carefully guarded, so that no student may elect
courses in modern German, the novel and the drama, who has not
already been well grounded in Goethe, Schiller, and Lessing. The
drastic thoroughness with which unpromising students are weeded
out of the courses in German enhances rather than defeats their
popularity among undergraduates.
The learned women who direct Wellesley's work in Philosophy and
Psychology lend their own distinction to this department. Professor
Case, a graduate of the University of Michigan, has been connected
with the college since 1884, and her courses in Greek Philosophy
and the Philosophy of Religion make an appeal to thoughtful students
which does not lessen as the years pass. Professor Gamble,
Wellesley's own daughter, is the foremost authority on smell,
among psychologists. In her chosen field of experimental psychology
she has achieved results attained by no one else, and her work
has a Continental reputation. Professor Calkins, the head of the
Department, is one of the distinguished alumnae of Smith College.
She has also passed Harvard's examination for the Doctor's degree;
but Harvard does not yet confer its degree upon women. She was
the first woman to receive the degree of Litt.D. from Columbia
University, and the first woman to be elected to the presidency
of the American Psychological Association, succeeding William James
in that office.
In the Department of Economics and Sociology, organized under
the leadership of Professor Katharine Coman, in 1901, Wellesley
has been fortunate in having as teachers two women of national
reputation whose interest in the human side of economic problems
has vitalized for their eager classes a subject which unless
sympathetically handled, lends itself all too easily to mechanical
interpretations of theory. Professor Coman's wide and intimate
knowledge of American economic conditions, as evidenced in her
books, the "Industrial History of the United States", and "Economic
Beginnings of the Far West", in her studies in Social Insurance
published in The Survey, and in her practical work for the College
Settlements Association and the Consumers' League, and as an
active member of the Strike Committee during the strike of the
Chicago Garment Workers in 1910-1911, lent to her teaching an
appeal which more cloistered theorists can never achieve. The
letters which came to her from alumnae, after her resignation
from the department in 1913, were of the sort that every teacher
cherishes. Since her death in January, 1915, some of these letters
have been printed in a memorial number of the Wellesley College
News. Nothing could better illustrate her influence as an intellectual
force in the college to which she came as an instructor in 1880.
One of her oldest students writes:
"I am too late for the thirtieth anniversary, but still it is
never too late to say how much I enjoyed my work with you in
college. It always seemed such grown-up work. Partly, I suppose,
because it was closely related to the things of life, and partly
because you demanded a more grown-up and thoughtful point of view.
It was a great privilege to have your Economics as a sophomore.
I have always meant to tell you, too, of what great practical value
your seminar in Statistics was to me; it gave me enough insight
into the principles and practice to encourage me to present my
work the first year out of college in statistical form. It was
approved. Without the incentive and the little experience I had
gained from you I might not have tried to do this. Since then,
in whatever field of social work I have been I have found this
ability valuable, and I developed enough skill at it to handle
the investigation into wages of the Massachusetts Minimum Wage
Commission without other training. I am very grateful to you for
this bit of technical training for which I would never have taken
the time later."
Another says: "It is a pleasure to have an opportunity, after so
many years, to make some expression of the gratitude I owe you.
The course in Political Economy which I was so wise as to take
with you has proved of vital importance to me. That was in 1887-1888,
but as I look back I see that in your teaching then, you presented
to us the ideas, the concepts, which are now accepted principles
of men's thought as to the relation of class to class, of man to
man. And so I feel that it was to your enthusiasm, your power of
inspiring your pupils that I owe my own interest in economic and
sociological affairs."
And still another: "I have had more real pleasure from my Economics
courses and Sociology courses than from any others of my college
course. Had it not been for yourself and Miss Balch, that work
would not have stood for so much. For your guidance and your
inspiration I am most grateful. I have tried to carry out your
ideals as far as possible in the Visiting Nurse work and the
Social Settlement in Omaha ever since leaving Wellesley."
Professor Emily Greene Balch, who succeeded Miss Coman as head
of the Department of Economics, is herself an authority on questions
of immigration; her book, "Our Slavic Fellow Citizens", is an
important contribution to the history of the subject, and has been
cited in the German Reichstag as authoritative on Slavic immigration.
She has also served on more than one State commission in
Massachusetts,--among them the disinterested and competent City
Planning Board,--and the sanity and judicial balance of her opinions
are recognized and valued by conservatives and radicals alike.
Besides the traditional courses in Economic History and Theory,
Wellesley offers under Miss Balch a course in Socialism, a critical
study of its main theories and political movements, open to juniors
and seniors who have already completed two other courses in
Economics; a course entitled "The Modern Labor Movement", in which
special attention is given to labor legislation, factory inspection,
and the organization of labor, with a study of methods of meeting
the difficulties of the modern industrial situation; and a course
in Immigration and the problems to which it gives rise in the
United States.
The Wellesley fire did the college one good turn by bringing to
the notice of the general public the departments of Science. When
so many of the laboratories and so much of the equipment were
swept away, outsiders became aware of the excellent work which
was being done in those laboratories; of the modern work in Geology
and Geography carried on not only in Wellesley but for the teachers
of Boston by Professor Fisher who is so wisely developing the
department which Professor Niles set on its firm foundation; of
the work of Professor Robertson who is an authority on the bryozoa
fauna of the Pacific coast of North America and Japan; of the
authoritative work on the life history of Pinus, by Professor
Ferguson of the Department of Botany; of the quiet, thorough,
modern work for students in Physics and Chemistry and Astronomy.
An evidence of the excellent organization of departmental work
at Wellesley is found in the ease and smoothness with which the
Department of Hygiene, formerly the Boston Normal School of
Gymnastics, has become a force in the Wellesley curriculum under
the direction of Miss Amy Morris Homans, who was also the head
of the school in Boston. By a gradual process of adjustment,
admission to the two years' course leading to a certificate in
the Department of Hygiene "will be limited to applicants who are
candidates for the B.A. degree at Wellesley College and to those
who already hold the Bachelor's degree either from Wellesley College
or from some other college." A five years' course is also offered,
by which students may obtain both the B.A. degree and the certificate
of the department. But all students, whether working for the
certificate or not, must take a one-hour course in Hygiene in
the freshman year, and two periods a week of practical gymnastic
work in the freshman and sophomore years.
Like all American colleges, Wellesley makes heavy and constant
demands on the mere pedagogic power of its teachers. Their days
are pretty well filled with the classroom routine and the necessary
and incessant social intercourse with the eager crowd of youth.
It may be years before an American college for women can sustain
and foster creative scholarship for its own sake, after the example
of the European universities; but Wellesley is not ungenerous;
the Sabbatical Grant gives certain heads of departments an opportunity
for refreshment and personal work every seven years; and even those
who do not profit by this privilege manage to keep their minds
alive by outside work and contacts.
Every two years the secretary to the president issues a list of
faculty publications, ranging from verse and short stories in the
best magazines to papers in learned reviews for esoteric consumption
only; from idyllic novels, such as Margaret Sherwood's "Daphne",
and sympathetic travel sketches like Katharine Lee Bates's "Spanish
Highways and Byways", to scholarly translations, such as Sophie
Jewett's "Pearl" and Vida D. Scudder's "Letters of St. Catherine of
Siena", and philosophical treatises, of which Mary Whiton Calkins's
"Persistent Problems of Philosophy", translated into several
languages, is a notable example.
But the Wellesley faculty is a public-spirited body; its contribution
to the general life is not only abstract and literary; for many of
its members are identified with modern movements toward better
citizenship. Miss Balch, besides her work on municipal committees,
is connected with the Woman's Trade Union League, and is interested
in the great movement for peace. In the spring of 1915, she was
one of those who sailed with Miss Jane Addams to attend the Woman's
Peace Congress at the Hague, and she afterwards visited other
European countries on a mission of peace. Miss Bates is active
in promoting the interests of the International Institute in Spain.
The American College for Girls in Constantinople often looks to
Wellesley for teachers, and more than one Wellesley professor
has given a Sabbatical year to the schoolgirls in Constantinople.
During the absence of President Patrick, Professor Roxana Vivian
of Wellesley was acting president, and had the honor of bringing
the college safely through the perplexities and terrors of the
Young Turks' Revolution in 1908 and 1909. Professor Kendall,
of the Department of History, is Wellesley's most distinguished
traveler. Her book, "A Wayfarer in China", tells the story of
some of her travels, and she has received the rare honor, for
a woman, of being made a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society.
Miss Calkins is an officer of the Consumers' League. Miss Scudder
has been identified from its outset with the College Settlements
Movement, and of late years with the new service to Italian
immigrants inaugurated by Denison House.
As a result of these varied interests, the intellectual fellowship
among the older women in the college community is of a peculiarly
stimulating quality, and the fact that it is almost exclusively a
feminine fellowship does not affect its intellectuality. The
Wellesley faculty, like the faculty of Harvard, is not a cloistered
body, and contact with the minds of "a world of men" through books
and the visitations of itinerant scholars is about as easy in the
one case as in the other. Every year Wellesley has her share of
distinguished visitors, American, European, and Oriental, scholars,
poets, scientists, statesmen, who enrich her life and enlarge
her spiritual vision.
III.
One chapter of Wellesley's history it is too soon to write: the
story of the great names and great personalities, the spiritual
stuff of which every college is built. This is the chapter on
which the historians of men's colleges love best to dwell. But
the women's lips and pens are fountains sealed, for a reticent
hundred years--or possibly less, under pressure--with the seals
of academic reserve, and historic perspective, and traditional
modesty. Most of the women who had a hand in the making of
Wellesley's first forty years are still alive. There's the rub.
It would not hamper the journalist. But the historian has his
conventions. One hundred years from now, what names, living
to-day, will be written in Wellesley's golden book? Already they
are written in many prophetic hearts. However, women can keep
a secret.
Even of those who have already finished their work on earth, it is
too soon to speak authoritatively; but gratitude and love will not
be silent, and no story of Wellesley's first half-century would
be complete that held no records of their devotion and continuing
influence.
Among the pioneers, there was no more interesting and forceful
personality than Susan Maria Hallowell, who came to Wellesley as
Professor of Natural History in 1875, the friend of Agassiz and
Asa Gray. She was a Maine woman, and she had been teaching
twenty-two years, in Bangor and Portland, before she was called
to Wellesley. Her successor in the Department of Botany writes
in a memorial sketch of her life:
"With that indefatigable zeal so characteristic of her whole life,
she began the work in preparation for the new position. She went
from college to college, from university to university, studying
the scientific libraries and laboratories. At the close of this
investigation she announced to the founders of the college that
the task which they had assigned to her was too great for any
one individual to undertake. There must be several professorships
rather than one. Of those named she was given first choice, and
when, in 1876, she opened her laboratories and actually began her
teaching in Wellesley College, she did so as professor of Botany,
although her title was not formally changed until 1878.
"The foundations which she laid were so broad and sure, the several
courses which she organized were so carefully outlined, that,
except where necessitated by more recent developments in science,
only very slight changes in the arrangement and distribution of
the work in her department have since been necessary.... She
organized and built up a botanical library which from the first
was second to that of no other college in the country, and is
to-day only surpassed by the botanical libraries of a few of our
great universities."
Fortunately the botanical library and the laboratories were housed
in Stone Hall, and escaped devastation by the fire.
Professor Hallowell was the first woman to be admitted to the
botanical lectures and laboratories of the University of Berlin.
She "was not a productive scholar", again we quote from Professor
Ferguson, "as that term is now used, and hence her gifts and her
achievements are but little known to the botanists of to-day. She
was preeminently a teacher and an organizer. Only those who knew
her in this double capacity can fully realize the richness of her
nature and the power of her personality." She retired from active
service at the college in February, 1902, when she was made
Professor Emeritus; but she lived in Wellesley village with her
friend, Miss Horton, the former professor of Greek, until her
death in 1911. Mrs. North gives us a charming glimpse of the
quaint and dignified little old lady. "When in recent years the
blossoming forth of academic dress made a pageant of our great
occasions, the badges of scholarship seemed to her foreign to the
simplicity of true learning, and she walked bravely in the
Commencement procession, wearing the little bonnet which henceforth
became a distinction."
Another early member of the Department of Botany, Clara Eaton
Cummings, who came to Wellesley as a student in 1876 and kept her
connection with the college until her death, as associate professor,
in 1906, was a scientific scholar of distinguished reputation.
Her work in cryptogamic botany gained the respect of botanists
for Wellesley.
With this pioneer group belongs also Professor Niles, who was
actively connected with the college from 1882 until his retirement
as Professor Emeritus in 1908. Wellesley shares with the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology her precious memories of
this devoted gentleman and scholar. His wise planning set the
Department of Geology and Geography on its present excellent
basis. At his death in 1910, a valuable legacy of geological
specimens came to Wellesley, only to be destroyed in 1914 by the
fire. But his greatest gifts to the college are those which no
fire can ever harm.
Anne Eugenia Morgan, professor in the Department of Philosophy
from 1878 to 1900; Mary Adams Currier, enthusiastic head of the
Department of Elocution from 1875 to 1896, the founder of the
Monroe Fund for her department; Doctor Speakman, Doctor Barker,
Wellesley's resident physicians in the early days; dear Mrs. Newman,
who mothered so many college generations of girls at Norumbega,
and will always be to them the ideal house-mother,--when old alumnae
speak these names, their hearts glow with unchanging affection.
But the most vivid of all these pioneers, and one of the most
widely known, was Carla Wenckebach. Of her, Wellesley has a picture
and a memory which will not fade, in the brilliant biography
[Carla Wenckebach, Pioneer (Ginn & Co. pub.).] by her colleague and
close friend, Margarethe Muller, who succeeded her in the Department
of German. As an interpretation of character and personality,
this book takes its place with Professor Palmer's "Life of Alice
Freeman Palmer", among literary biographies of the first rank.
Professor Wenckebach came to Wellesley in 1883, and we have the
story of her coming, in her own letters, given us in translation
by Professor Muller. She was attending the Sauveur Summer School
of Languages at Amherst, and had been asked to take some classes
there, in elementary German, where her methods immediately attracted
attention; and presently we find her writing:
"Hurrah! I have made a superb catch--not a widower nor a bachelor,
but something infinitely superior! I must not anticipate, though,
but proceed according to program....
"The other day, when I was in my room digging away at my Greek
lessons, the landlady brings in three visiting cards, remarking
that the three ladies who wish to see me are in the reception room.
I look at the cards and read: Miss Alice Freeman, President
(in German, Rector Magnificus) of Wellesley College; Mrs. Durant,
Treasurer; and Miss Denio, Professor of German Literature at
Wellesley College (Wellesley, you must know, is the largest and
most magnificent of all the women's colleges in the United States).
I immediately comprehended that these were three lions (grosse
Tiere), and I began to have curious presentiments. Fortunately,
I was in correct dress, so that I could rush down into our elegant
reception room. Here I made a solemn bow, the three ladies
returning the compliment. The president, a lady who must be a
good deal younger than myself, a real Ph.D. (of Philosophy and
History), told me that she had heard of me and therefore wished
to see me in regard to a vacancy at Wellesley College, which,
according to the statutes, must not be filled by a man so long
as a woman could be procured. The woman she was looking for must
be able, she said, to give lectures on German Literature in German,
and to expound the works of German writers thoroughly; she would
engage me for this position, she added, if she found that I was
the right person for it.
"I was dumfounded at the mere suggestion of this gift of Heaven
coming to me, for I had heard so many beautiful things about
Wellesley that the idea of possibly getting a position there
totally dazed me. Summoning up courage, however, I controlled
my wild joy, and pulling myself together with determination, I
gave the ladies the desired account of my studies, my journalistic
work, etc., whereupon the president informed me that she would
attend my class the next day."
The ordeal was successfully passed, and the position of "head
teacher in the German Department at Wellesley" was immediately
offered her. "Now you think, I suppose, that I fell round the
necks of those angels of joy! I didn't though!" she blithely
writes. But she agreed to visit Wellesley, and her description
of this visit gives us old College Hall in a new light.
"The place in itself is so beautiful that we could hardly realize
its being merely a school. The Royal Palace in Berlin is small
compared to the main building, which in length and stateliness
of appearance surpasses even the great Winter Palace in St. Petersburg.
The entrance hall is decorated with magnificent palms, with
valuable paintings, and choice statuary. The walls in all the
corridors are covered with fine engravings; there are carpets
everywhere and elegant pieces of furniture; there is gas, steam
heat, and a big elevator; everything, down to the bathrooms,
is princely."
Professor Muller adds, "Of course, she was 'kind enough' to accept
the position offered, although it was not especially lucrative.
'But what is a high salary,' she exclaims, 'in comparison to the
ease and enthusiasm with which I can here plow a new field of work!
That, and the honor attached to the position, are worth more to
me than thousands of dollars. I am to be a regular grosses Tier
now myself,--what fun, after having been a beast of burden so long!'"
From the first, Wellesley recognized her quality, and wisely gave
it freedom. In addition to her work in German, we owe to her the
beginnings of the Department of Education, through her lectures
on Pedagogy.
Speaking of her power, Professor Muller says: "Truly, as a teacher,
especially a teacher of youth, Fraulein Wenckebach was unexcelled.
There was that relieving and inspiring, that broadening and yet
deepening quality in her work, that ease and grace and joy, that
mark the work of the elect only,--of those rare souls among us
who are 'near the shaping hand of the Creator.'" And Fraulein
Wenckebach herself said of her profession: "Every teacher, every
educator, should above all be a guide. Not one of those who, like
signposts, stretch their wooden arms with pedantic insistence in
a given direction, but one, rather, who, after the manner of the
heavenly bodies, diffusing warmth and light and cheer, draws the
young soul irresistibly to leave its dark jungles of prejudice and
ignorance for the promised land of wisdom and freedom." And her
students testify enthusiastically to her unusual success. One
of them writes:
"To Fraulein Wenckebach as a teacher, I owe more than to any other
teacher I ever had. I cannot remember that she reproved any
student or that she ever directly urged us to do our best. She
made no efforts to make her lectures attractive by witticisms,
anecdotes, or entertaining illustrations. Yet her students worked
with eager faithfulness, and I, personally, have never been so
absorbed and inspired by any lectures as by hers. The secret of
her power was not merely that she was master of the art of teaching
and knew how to arouse interest and awaken the mind to independent
thought and inquiry, but that her own earnestness and high purpose
touched our lives and made anything less than the highest possible
degree of effort and attainment seem not worth while."--"We girls
used to say to each other that if we ever taught we should want
to be to our students what she was to us, and if they could feel
as we felt toward her and her work we should want no more. She
demanded the best of us, without demanding, and what she gave us
was beyond measure.--It was courses like hers that made us feel
that college work was the best part of college life."
These are the things that teachers care most to hear, and in the
nineteen years of her service at Wellesley, there were many students
eager to tell her what she had been to them. She writes in 1886:
"What a privilege to pour into the receptive mind of young American
girls the fullness of all that is precious about the German spirit;
and how enthusiastically they receive all I can give them!"
In the late eighties and early nineties there came to the college
a notable group of younger women, destined to play an important
part in Wellesley's life and to increase her academic reputation:
Mary Whiton Calkins, Margarethe Muller, Adeline B. Hawes, the able
head of the Department of Latin, Katharine M. Edwards, of the
Department of Greek, Sophie de Chantal Hart, of the Department
of English Composition, Vida D. Scudder, Margaret Sherwood, and
Sophie Jewett, of the Department of English Literature. In the
autumn of 1909, Sophie Jewett died, and never has the college been
stirred to more intimate and personal grief. So many poets, so
many scholars, are not lovable; but this scholar-poet quickened
every heart to love her. To live in her house, to sit at her
table, to listen to her "cadenced voice" in the classrooms, were
privileges which those who shared them will never forget. Her
colleague, Professor Scudder, speaking at the memorial service
in the College Chapel, said:
"We shall long rejoice to dwell on the ministry of love that was
hers to exercise in so rare a measure, through her unerring and
reverent discernment of all finest aspects of beauty; on her
sensitive allegiance to truth; on the fine reticence of her
imaginative passion; on that heavenly sympathy and selflessness
of hers, a selflessness so deep that it bore no trace of effort or
resolute purpose, but was simply the natural instinct of the soul....
"Let us give thanks, then, for all her noble and delicate powers;
for her all-controlling Christianity; for her subtle rectitude of
intellectual and spiritual vision; for her swift ardor for all
high causes and great dreams; for that unbounded tenderness toward
youth, that firm and steady standard of scholarship, that central
hunger for truth, which gave high quality to her teaching, and
which during twenty years have been at the service of Wellesley
College and of the Department of English Literature."
This very giving of herself to the claims of the college hampered,
to a certain extent, her poetic creativeness; the volumes that
she has left are as few as they are precious, every one "a pearl."
Speaking of these poems, Miss Scudder says: "And in her own
verse,--do we not catch to a strange degree, hushed echoes of
heavenly music? These lyrics are not wholly of the earth: they
vibrate subtly with what I can only call the sense of the Eternal.
How beautiful, how consoling, that her last book should have been
that translation, such as only one who was at once true poet and
true scholar could have made, of the sweetest medieval elegy
'The Pearl'!" And Miss Bates, in her preface to the posthumous
volume of "Folk-Ballads of Southern Europe", illumines for us
the scholarship which went into these close and sympathetic
translations:
"For the Roumanian ballads, although she pored over the originals,
she had to depend, in the main, upon French translation, which
was usually available, too, for the Gascon and Breton. Italian,
which she knew well, guided her through obscure dialects of Italy
and Sicily, but Castilian, Portuguese, and Catalan she puzzled out
for herself with such natural insight that the experts to whom
these translations have been submitted found hardly a word to
change. 'After all,' as she herself wrote, 'ballads are simple
things, and require, as a rule, but a limited vocabulary, though
a peculiarly idiomatic one.'"
Not the least poetic of her books, although it is written in prose,
is the delicate interpretation of St. Francis, written for children
and called "God's Troubadour."
"Erect, serene, she came and went
On her high task of beauty bent.
For us who knew, nor can forget,
The echoes of her laughter yet
Make sudden music in the halls."
["In Memoriam: Sophie Jewett." A poem by Margaret Sherwood,
Wellesley College News, May 1, 1913.]
In 1913, Madame Colin, who had served the college as head of
the Department of French since 1905, died during the spring recess
after a three days' illness. Madame Colin had studied at the
University of Paris and the Sorbonne, and her ideals for her
department were high.
Among Wellesley's own alumnae, only a very few who were officers
of the college during the first forty years have died. Of these
are Caroline Frances Pierce, of the class of 1891, who was librarian
from 1903 to 1910. To her wise planning we owe the conveniences
and comforts in the new library building which she did not live
to see completed.
In 1914, the Department of Greek suffered a deep loss in Professor
Annie Sybil Montague, of the class of 1879. Besides being a
member of the first graduating class, Miss Montague was one of
the first to receive the degree of M.A. from Wellesley. In 1882,
the college conferred this degree for the first time, and Miss
Montague was one of the two candidates who presented themselves.
One of her old students, Annie Kimball Tuell, of the class of 1896,
herself an instructor in the Department of English Literature, writes:
I think Miss Montague would wish that another of her pupils,
one who worked with her for an unusually long time, should
say--what can most simply and most warmly and most gratefully
be said--that she was a good teacher. So I want to say it
formally for myself and for all the others and for all the
years. For I suppose that if we were doomed to go before
our girls for a last judgment, the best and the least of us
would care just for the simple bit of testimony that we knew
our business and attended to it. And of all the good people
who made college days so rich for me, there is none of whom
I could say this more entirely than of Miss Montague.
Often as I have caught sight of her in the jostling crowd of
the second floor, I have felt a lively regret that she was
known to so few of the girls, and that her excellent ability
to give zest to drill and to stablish fluttering wits in order,
could not have a fuller and freer exercise. In the old days
we valued what she had to give, and in the usual silent,
thankless way, elected her courses as long as there were
courses to elect; but we have had to teach many years since
to know how special that gift of hers was. Just as closer
acquaintance with herself proved her breadth of mind and
sympathy not quite understood before, so more intelligent
knowledge of her methods showed them to be broader and more
fundamental than we had quite comprehended. With her handling,
rules and sub-rules ceased to jostle and confuse one another,
but grouped themselves in a simpler harmony which we thought
a very beautiful discovery, and grammar took on a reasonable
unity which seemed a marvel. So we took our laborious days
with cheer and enjoyed the energy, for we quite understood
that our work would lead to something.
But if there could be an interchange of grace and I could take
a gift from Miss Montague's personality, I would rather have
what she in a matter-of-fact way would take for granted, but
what is harder for us who are beginners here to come by,--I mean
her altogether fine and blameless relation to her girls outside
the classroom. She was a presence always heartily responsive,
but never unwary, without the slightest reflection of her
personality upon us, with never a word too much of praise
or blame, of too much intimacy or of too much reserve. She
was a figure of familiar friendliness, ready with sympathy and
comprehension, but wholesome, sound and sane, without trace
of sentimentality. Above all, I felt her a singularly honorable
spirit, toward whom we always turned our best side, to whom
we might never go with talk wanton or idle or unkind or
critical, but always with our very precious thoughts on
whatsoever things are eager, and honest and kindly and of good
report. And so she was able to do us much good and no harm
at all. She can have had no millstones about her neck to
reckon with....
Miss Montague used to have a little class in Plato, and I have
not forgotten how quietly we read together one day at the end
of the Phaedo of the death of Socrates. After Miss Montague
died, I turned to the book and found the place where the servant
has brought the cup of poison, but Crito, unreconciled, wants
to delay even a little:
"For the sun," said he, "is yet on the hills, and many a man
has drunk the draught late."
"Yes," said Socrates, "since they wished for delay. But
I do not think that I should gain anything by drinking the
cup a little later."
In January, 1915, while this story of Wellesley was being written,
Katharine Coman, Professor Emeritus of Economics, went like a
conqueror to the triumph of her death. Miss Coman's power as
a teacher has been spoken of on an earlier page, but she will be
remembered in the college and outside as more than a teacher. Her
books and her active interest in industrial affairs, her noble
attitude toward life, all have had their share in informing and
directing and inspiring the college she loved.
"A mountain soul, she shines in crystal air
Above the smokes and clamors of the town.
Her pure, majestic brows serenely wear
The stars for crown.
"She comrades with the child, the bird, the fern,
Poet and sage and rustic chimney-nook,
But Pomp must be a pilgrim ere he earn
Her mountain look.
"Her mountain look, the candor of the snow,
The strength of folded granite, and the calm
Of choiring pines, whose swayed green branches strow
A healing balm.
* * * * * * *
"For lovely is a mountain rosy-lit
With dawn, or steeped in sunshine, azure-hot,
But loveliest when shadows traverse it,
And stain it not."
[From a poem, "A Mountain Soul," by Katharine Lee Bates, 1904.]