COLLEGE CELEBRATION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22538, 1 October 1936, Page 3

COLLEGE CELEBRATION

PIONEER EDUCATIONIST One of the seven leading colleges for women in the United States, Barnard College, recently observed the 25th anniversary of Virginia Gildersleeve's appointment as dean. One of the most brilliant and best known of women educationists in the States, Virginia Gildersleeve was herself a student at Barnard, back in the nineties when women who sought a university education were regarded as freaks._ A fellow student of those days, Alice Duer Miller, the novelist, who has written an appreciation of Dean Virginia Gildersleeve and her work for the New York Herald Tribune, recalls how in the nineties —though it was grudgingly admitted that women had proved they were capable of passing the examinations —the notion that a woman had not the mental capacity for higher education was the main obstacle the generation before, the real pioneers in higher education for women, had to contend with. The college woman was still counted a crank and an oddity. The general consensus of opinion was that a woman who asked for so alienating an advantage as a good education was not lit to be a wife, mother—or even a dancing partner! "We were for ever under observation," she writes. "If we missed church, college women were atheistical. If we smoked a cigarette—and we didn't smoke many in those days!—college women were immoral; if we tore a dress, college had made us slatterns; if we were cross in the home, college had made us arrogant and discontented." And the result of this continual criticism and carping was that every one of the students of those early days felt herself responsible to the world at largo for the reputation of all college women. "We felt an almost slavish gratitude to any of our number ! who did us credit, not only in college, but in the world outside. And no one has ever done us more credit than the present Dean of Barnard," her old college friend declares. Virginia Gildersleeve was the daughter of a well-known Judge, and on her mother's side a descendant of a French Huguenot family. She selected the qualities she inherited from her parents judiciously. A sane, balanced outlook, a friendly sense of justice, she took from her father, and the methodical neatness and precision'of mind of the born executive she inherited from her Huguenot mother, along with the quickness of wit—and the fire that made her a brilliant speaker, and a forceful personality. These qualities were strongly marked even in her "freshman" days, and there, was not one of her classmates who was not confident that Virginia Gilder, leeve would one day be Dean of Barnard! And as Dean of Barnard for 25 years hers has been a valuable contribution to the progress of women's education.