Читать книгу The Deans' Bible - Angie Klink - Страница 14

SIX YEARS AFTER CAROLYN SHOEMAKER was appointed Purdue’s first dean of women, Stanley Coulter, Carolyn’s former instructor, was named Purdue’s first dean of men. Slowly, universities in the United States added the Office of the Dean of Men during the 1910s and 1920s. Administrators were jittery about women on campus, so they made rules and regulations for them and thought a dean of women was needed to guide the girls. The male students were left to their own devices with few rules, so at the outset, administrators didn’t think they needed a dean of men.

In 1916, the deans of women united officially and founded the National Association of Deans of Women (NADW), a branch of the National Education Association (NEA). The first annual meeting, organized by Kathryn Sisson Phillips, dean of women at Ohio Wesleyan University, was entitled “What a Dean of Women Is—What Her Duties Are.” Gertrude S. Martin gave the key address at the first program and pinpointed poetically what a dean does:

We are trying to define the dean. Some say the dean is just a chaperone—a nice, ladylike person. Others say the dean is a necessary evil, a concession.… Others say the dean is a sort of adjunct to the President, because the President usually lacks at least one of the qualifications for the dean.

The fact is the dean of women is unique! She is expected to teach and do a great many other things. She is preeminently a teacher of the art of living. She asks: How many of us are artists of life ourselves?

Often when a group of women come together, there is a sisterhood formed that can facilitate change. The collecting of deans of women was no different. In the decades to follow, the NADW would prove to be a lobbying powerhouse and a force of nature as it connected deans of women throughout the country in common goals for females everywhere. Their discussions and resolutions were on cutting-edge topics. They came to define themselves as humanists. Future Purdue deans of women would make their marks and become known throughout the United States through the NADW, later named the National Association of Women Deans and Counselors (NAWDC).

The early deans of women established the foundations of professional practice for student affairs and higher education administration. They developed a body of professional literature, which included journals, research reports, and books. The deans of women at Purdue would write many papers for such periodicals.

The pioneering women of NADW worked hard to “professionalize” the position of dean and to legitimize her role. The deans of women were early champions of the scientific methods of guidance for students. After World War I, their vocation would be termed “student personnel work.” They often challenged each other and their campuses to “do the right thing” by women. During their first informal meeting in Chicago in 1903, the country’s collective deans of women passed a resolution condemning “gender segregation” in higher education. This cause to condemn gender segregation in universities perpetuates still today.

In “How the Deans of Women Became Men,” printed in The Review of Higher Education, Robert A. Schwartz wrote candidly of the unfair, demeaning, and stereotypical views of deans of women: “Many of their significant accomplishments have been lost or ignored in compilations of the modern history of higher education. What remains is an unfortunate caricature of deans of women as ‘snooping battle axes’—prudish spinsters who bedeviled the harmless fun seeking of their students.”

Schwartz also gave his opinion as to why the achievements of deans of women have been disregarded: “This inaccurate view results from the male voice’s domination of written and oral histories of American colleges and universities … the accomplishments of deans of women have rarely received honest evaluation, validation, or appreciation. Rather, they have been discounted, discredited, or ignored.”

Schwartz then imparted women deans their due: “In reality, the deans of women were consummate professionals who anchored much of their work to the academic principles of rigorous research and scholarly dissemination of their findings. Many of the significant and well-established practices of student affairs work and higher education administrations that exist today were first put in place through the work of the deans of women.”

Additionally, the deans of men gathered as a group but with a very different mind-set and direction. The first recorded meeting of deans of men took place casually in 1919 “for a discussion of our problems.” The men came together because of a concern about student discipline. (Since the male students had few rules, unlike the females who had many, it is understandable that discipline would be a concern.)

Two years later, the gathering formerly organized under the name of the National Association of Deans of Men (NADM). The meetings were social and club-like, sounding almost like a men’s society where they could imbibe and smoke cigars, in contrast to the professionalism of the national conferences of the deans of women. According to Schwartz: “The deans of men enjoyed the opportunity to converse, to enjoy local hospitalities and activities, and to regale each other with tales from their campuses. Over time, issues of professionalism, graduate study, and the role of the dean of men were topics of discussion, but they were addressed in a more affable, informal manner with less emphasis on scholarship and research than the deans of women demonstrated in their sessions.”

Purdue’s own Dean of Men Stanley Coulter revealed his sense of humor when he described his position. Coulter said:

What is Dean of Men? I have tried to define him. When the Board of Trustees elected me Dean of Men, I wrote to them very respectfully and asked them to give me the duties of the Dean of Men. They wrote back that they did not know what they were but when I found out to let them know. I worked all the rest of the year trying to find out. I discovered that every unpleasant task that the president or the faculty did not want to do was my task. I was convinced that the Dean of Men’s office was intended as the dumping ground of all unpleasant things.

CAROLYN’S LOVE OF LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE blossomed in her speeches. The creation of a Community Center for Women began through her articulated words.

During World War I, when women sewed bandages and knitted socks, gloves, and hats to be sent overseas to the men in battle, fifteen sewing machines belonging to war relief organizations were hauled around the city of Lafayette because they had no permanent resting spot where women could congregate and work for civic causes. Carolyn not only thought of the welfare and needs of her Purdue women, but she wanted to help women of her community.

Lucy Eunice Coulter (wife of Purdue’s Stanley Coulter) was superintendent of the Industrial School and Free Kindergarten in Lafayette. Members of the Purdue faculty volunteered their services there.

On Valentine’s Day that year, Carolyn was asked to speak to the women on the board of this organization. The title of her speech was “Civic Needs.” She talked about the necessity of a central meeting place and shelter for girls and women. Carolyn was concerned about women who visited the city from rural farms who spent time on the streets or in a lonely boarding house. There was no common meeting place open to them. Her speech was inspiring and roused the board to purchase a building to serve the community.

The group found a home to purchase at 617 Ferry Street. Carolyn paid $800 into a fund to create the Community House. The Community House Association was formed, and with her large donation, Carolyn was made a life member of its board of directors.

Eventually, the Industrial School and Free Kindergarten became a part of the public school system, and the Community House was used solely for women’s society meetings and rented sleeping rooms for women. The YWCA held its first meetings there. In subsequent years, Carolyn’s dean of women successors would also heed the call to help women and families of the Lafayette community and foster strong connections to the YWCA.

AS EARLY AS 1913, Purdue’s female students were longing for a new residence hall and classroom building to replace the decaying Ladies Hall. Yet it would be years before they would see a new women’s residence hall built on Purdue’s campus. In the 1919 Debris yearbook, a poem called “The Coed’s Plea” was printed. In lighthearted rhyme, the women students lamented their need for a new building and how other new structures on campus, such as a new horse barn, received precedence over providing an adequate facility for women.

Inside Ladies Hall, the walls were cracking and chunks of plaster fell into the bread dough the women mixed; the coeds were forced to work in dim light because many of the gaslights were inoperable; and dishpans were scattered around the building to catch leaks from the water pipes. The poem ended with these lines: “And now, Purdue, you wonder why / We’re sour and cross today. / It’s all because we coeds few / Are treated in this way.”

Accompanying the poem printed in the 1919 Debris, Carolyn wrote an essay titled “Woman’s Building.” She said, “The number of girls enrolled in the University has been more than doubled in the past few years.” There were 247 women registered, and she attributed the increase to the fact that the women were offered courses that appealed to them, and “we have taken care of our girls.” Carolyn continued, “This, in fine, is the Purdue spirit. Progressive? Yes. And we have accomplished it all with no place that is peculiarly our own. But with a Woman’s Building with headquarters for our various activities,—well, just watch us and see!”

In 1920, the women were still waiting for their new building, so Carolyn wrote another essay in the Debris, ending with words of empowerment: “With the advent of a Woman’s Building there will be a new order of things. And with a Dormitory we could beat the world.”

Carolyn had established a rapport with the women students she affectionately called “my girls,” as is evident in a tribute they wrote to her: “She is sympathetic to the popular activities of the University and is ready to march across the levee at the head of the coeds whenever a college demonstration is to be made—and never is too weary to chaperone a campus dance, even into the ‘wee sma’ hours.’”

In 1920, women gained the right to vote and Prohibition was instituted. The next year, the Indiana General Assembly passed a bill requiring the governor to select at least one woman among the six appointments to the Purdue University Board of Trustees. The women’s suffrage movement had put pressure on all public institutions to appoint qualified women when board positions became available. Indiana Governor Warren T. McCray selected Virginia Claypool Meredith, age seventy-two, as the first female member of the Purdue University Board of Trustees.

Virginia had been a “lady farmer,” managing a 115-acre farm in Cambridge City, Indiana, after her husband passed away. She was a nationally known agricultural writer and speaker. At the age of forty, Virginia became a single mother when she adopted the children of her late best friend. Her adopted daughter was Mary L. Matthews, who would become Purdue’s first dean of home economics. Mary and her graduate students taught at the Industrial School and Free Kindergarten where Carolyn was a lifetime board member.

During the Roaring Twenties, Virginia was the grand dame of Purdue. With so few women on campus and a rather small University population of approximately 3,200 students, her presence was noticeable at meetings and functions; photos show her with an understated regal air. Nearly always depicted as the only female standing with the other male trustees, she dressed in an ankle-length black dress, a cape, and a matching hat with plumes softly cascading over the brim. She wore black gloves and a scarf with a hefty tassel. Her layers of clothing seemed to weigh her down, for she stooped slightly with her head bowed; however, perhaps, rather than her strata of clothing, it was the enormity of being the first woman on the Purdue University Board of Trustees that pressed upon her. The first woman of any endeavor must set the pace and the example for those who follow in her stead.

At her initial meeting as Purdue’s first female trustee, Virginia voted with the board to authorize the construction of the Home Economics Building, a structure that five decades later would be named after her adopted daughter. Once the Home Economics Building was completed, Virginia turned her attention to creating a much-needed women’s residence hall.

Carolyn’s annual reports during the 1920s referred repeatedly to the need for scholarships, dormitory accommodations, and a women’s gymnasium. She continually expressed concern for the number of female students living in town for whom the University made no provision. In 1925, she urged the establishment of housing that would accommodate all freshmen women and thus do away with sorority rush, which she considered one of the worst aspects of college life. Often, women who were not selected for sorority membership withdrew from the University and returned home in humiliation and despair. Later, her successor, Dorothy Stratton, would share Carolyn’s aversion of rush and make a change in its structure.

Because women students could not find housing close to campus, they often walked great distances, and in the winter, they walked in the dark in their high-top, heeled shoes. The women often were physically uncomfortable and vulnerable to exhaustion, especially in hot weather. The average outfit a woman wore back then, with its layers of garments, took nineteen yards of material and weighed almost twenty-five pounds.

Virginia and a committee she established to study women’s housing recommended to the Purdue University Board of Trustees that Ladies Hall be renovated and used as a temporary dormitory until an adequate women’s hall could be erected. The board consented but put just enough money into the project to keep the building serviceable, and Ladies Hall housed fewer than fifty women.

Five years later, the cost for more repairs exceeded what the board was willing to spend, and Ladies Hall was demolished. One of the last of Purdue’s five original buildings disappeared. Virginia thought that the demise of Ladies Hall would speed up the construction of a women’s dormitory. After all, fifty women had been displaced. She pointed out that most land-grant colleges in the Midwest already offered modern residence halls for women; however, Purdue administrators again leased rooms for female students in local homes, and even Dean of Women Carolyn Shoemaker had to follow suit.

One of the homes was the George Dexter house on Marsteller Street where today’s Marsteller Parking Garage is located. This was where Carolyn made her office and home with some of her students.

In 1928, Frank Cary offered $60,000 to build a residence hall for women, which was to be named in memory of his wife who had passed away. The Carys previously had given money for the building of a men’s dormitory in memory of their late son. Today, that building is named Cary East, part of Cary Quadrangle.

Virginia was appreciative and thanked Frank Cary for his gift in a heartfelt resolution read to the board. The group assured Frank that they would borrow sufficient additional funds necessary to complete the construction of the women’s residence hall. With the go-ahead for the project, Virginia and the other trustees decided they would no longer lease the home for women students on Marsteller Street. As a result, Carolyn lost her office and was given a temporary space in the Engineering Administration Building. It would turn out to be not so “temporary.”

The plan was that the women’s dormitory would be built on property on what is today called Russell Street. Purdue expected to acquire this land from owner Phillip Russell. Years before, Phillip’s parents had donated land to John Purdue for the construction of the University; however, Phillip was not as generous as his parents and did not want to donate the land. The Women’s Residence Hall project faced suits and countersuits as Purdue tried to gain control of the Russell property. Frank Cary grew tired of waiting and eventually found another project in which he memorialized his late wife. He built the Jessie Levering Cary Home for Children in Lafayette.

Though Frank would not donate funds to build a women’s dormitory, he agreed to give money to build another men’s dormitory near Cary Hall. Not wanting to lose a chance at a donation, the Purdue board, including Virginia, agreed that the money would be accepted for the construction of another men’s dorm.

The male administration did not place a high priority on bringing female students to Purdue. Virginia had spent nine years working for better housing for women with nothing to show for her efforts, and Purdue’s enrollment of women was in jeopardy. Why would women choose to attend Purdue if adequate and safe housing was unavailable? It appears excuses were made. Bids came in “too high,” the designated land was caught in a legal battle, and the men in administration wondered how many women would actually be able to afford and want to stay in the new dormitory. Virginia, Carolyn, and the female students they fostered were left in limbo.

While Virginia spent much of her energy on women’s residential concerns, she also headed the effort to build Purdue’s Memorial Union. Just two months after she was appointed to the board, Virginia was named president of the Purdue Memorial Union Association Board of Governors. She was the principal figure in the design, construction, financing, and management of the building dedicated to the more than four thousand alumni who had served in the Civil War and World War I. Raising money to build the Memorial Union was an ongoing, agonizing process. She led the groundbreaking for the building in 1922, but it was not completed until 1930 when Virginia was eighty years old. This long gap was due to donors who were not honoring their commitments to pay their pledges to finance the construction; however, Carolyn made a handsome donation of $5,000 (the equivalent of $65,000 today), the largest contribution made by a woman.