Читать книгу The Deans' Bible - Angie Klink - Страница 21

FOR WOMEN, PURDUE WAS FIRING on all cylinders at the end of the 1930s. The synergy of Amelia Earhart, Lillian Gilbreth, Dorothy Stratton, and Helen Schleman beckoned bright-eyed young women who wanted to be a part of the internal combustion that was propelling women forward.

By 1937, Dorothy and her parents lived at 1007 Ravinia Road in West Lafayette. During Dorothy’s tenure, the enrollment of women at Purdue tripled. Dorothy recalled, “Dr. Elliott brought Amelia Earhart and Doctor Gilbreth to the campus, which was simply overwhelming. I have never known exactly why he did, and I’m not sure that he knew, but he did and it was great. It was wonderful. These two had a tremendous impact on all of us. For a lack of something better to put them in, they were attached to the Office of the Dean of Women. This was a great treat for me.”

Amelia and Lillian were concerned that there was no bachelor of arts degree offered at Purdue. Many women who came to Purdue in the 1930s wanted what would basically be a liberal arts degree, but for the most part, they were pigeonholed into home economics. Some female students were enrolled in the School of Science, and just a couple of women majored in engineering or agriculture. There was no bachelor of arts degree offered at Purdue because of a “gentlemen’s agreement.” Decades later, Dorothy explained: “At the time, David Ross, president of the Board of Trustees, told me at least fifty times that there was a gentlemen’s agreement with Indiana University that Purdue would never give the BA degree. I still don’t know what happened. When I tried to find out who the gentlemen were who made this decision, I never could find out, but of course gentlemen stick by their decisions.”

The “gentlemen’s agreement” was an understanding between Indiana University and Purdue University regarding the academic degrees each would offer. Indiana, located in the southern part of the state, would offer a liberal arts curriculum, while Purdue, as the land-grant university in the northwest part of the Hoosier landscape, would offer the sciences, engineering, and agriculture.

Often Dorothy was invited to the summer home of Purdue University Trustee and benefactor David Ross. He named his three-story house and surrounding wooded terrain “The Hills,” located in the country south of Purdue’s campus in what is today Ross Hills Park. Dorothy also would visit his home on South Seventh Street, which was across the street from President Elliott’s home in Lafayette. At The Hills, Dorothy played hostess during various Ross functions. She always visited the summer home with a chaperone; while in town, she would call on Ross alone.

There’s a photograph of Dorothy standing by steps that lead to an entrance of Ross’s summer cottage. She looks quite jaunty wearing jodhpurs—riding breeches—and riding boots, as if she rode a horse while visiting Ross. But friends say Dorothy was not a horsewoman, and perhaps she simply looked the part, as she was always superbly put together for any event. One can imagine Dorothy and David Ross sitting in his living room with the wall of windows facing the thickets that led down to the Wabash River. Perhaps they talked of the “gentlemen’s agreement” and how a Purdue curriculum could be instituted to attract more female students.

President Elliott and David Ross gave Dorothy the most resonating bits of philosophy to carry throughout her life. Elliott’s motto was, “No great deed was ever done by falterers asking for certainty.” From Ross, Dorothy learned the importance of releasing the creative energies of young people and giving them a chance to do things on their own—a philosophy that would serve her well in the myriad of careers she would enjoy throughout the twentieth century.

In 1937, at Dorothy’s urging, President Elliott appointed the Committee on the Education of Women to consider the problem of Purdue’s lack of a bachelor of arts degree. Professor Helen Hazelton, head of women’s physical education, led the group. The committee’s first report stated, “Much could be done on women students’ behalf simply by making the effort to either supplement or circumvent entrenched academic and administrative structures designed primarily to serve the vocational interests of men.”

In other words, Purdue should offer design classes and majors to appeal to women’s interests and concerns. Now the finding seems obvious, but alas, even today, entrenched male-oriented ideologies prevail for many disciplines like engineering.

Purdue, along with most universities of this era, felt duty-bound to prepare women for marriage and family life in loco parentis. While young women were away from the family nest, it was thought that universities were to be substitute parents, watching over female students, instilling societal expectations, and implementing rules and regulations. This philosophy persisted into the 1960s.

The committee recommended a course on the physical and psychological relations of marriage, problems of home management, economic aspects of marriage, child development, and community involvement. The report stated, “Such knowledge is as essential to effective living today as a knowledge of mathematics or the science of economics.”

Women were to be educated at Purdue, but not at the expense of family life. The course was not required of male students. Presumably, it was assumed men did not need such knowledge for “effective living” as husbands and fathers.

Dorothy explained the committee’s groundbreaking pronouncement: “This committee decided they would try an experiment. It was a small experiment, but we set up a curriculum for women. It was as close as we dare to come to a liberal arts degree.”

The new degree was developed as “liberal science.” One could have termed the new program a “ladies’ agreement.”

A curriculum was created with an emphasis on the sciences, as well as the opportunity to take a broad range of classes from any school in the university. Forty women were permitted to register in the School of Science for the first experimental semester. They were a select group, chosen on the basis of outstanding high school records, test scores, and recommendations, as well as personal interviews. Later, enrollment increased to about one hundred women.

Dorothy, Professor Hazleton, and Professor Dorothy Bovee, the program director, were determined to admit only women capable of meeting rigorous academic standards. In some campus publications, the students were referred to as “the guinea pigs.” Most of the women were explicitly not interested in home economics or technical scientific training. Women who wanted a liberal education and normally would not have considered Purdue learned of the curriculum and sought admittance. This was proof that the liberal science program was serving the audience for which it was created.

The course material presented fundamental scientific principles from an historical and philosophical perspective, and then raised questions about the role of science in contemporary life. The cover on the program brochure carried this subtitle: Modern Training for Modern Women. The women were enthusiastic and found the classes challenging and stimulating, taught by outstanding faculty who welcomed the chance to work with such capable and committed students. Former “guinea pigs” said of Professor Sol Boyk: “He’d have us running around the classroom, pretending to be electrons. He asked questions that set our heads spinning and challenged our traditional thinking methods. We learned to question, not just to be contrary, but to rethink our answers and the possibilities of new solutions. Chemistry was fun when we learned from him, but we learned so much more.”

Another professor who taught the women was Cornelius Lanczos, a shy refugee from Eastern Europe who had worked with Einstein and gave piano recitals for the students. Disheartened by the misconception that mathematics was thought to be a dry subject, he strived to give the women an appreciation of the imaginative and artistic character of mathematical thinking.

Professor Bovee sponsored the class “Women and Women’s Work,” a forerunner of women’s studies courses. The class highlighted important events in women’s history and encouraged students to value the importance of women’s varied roles as paid professionals and community volunteers, as well as homemakers responsible for raising the next generation. The course discussed vocations open to women, the choice between marriage and employment outside the home, the possibilities of combining both, and the possible means of maintaining the best balance between them—all hot topics still debated in the twenty-first century.

In the speech “Guinea Pigs: The Experimental Curriculum for Women at Purdue, 1939–1947” by professor of history Sarah Barnes, she states: “Above all, students in the experimental curriculum were encouraged to think of themselves as leaders—leaders with an awareness and understanding of the critical role of science in modern life, a clear perception of present-day social, economic and political problems and the resolve to confront and solve those problems in an objective and democratic fashion.”

Still today, women are encouraged to have faith in their abilities and think of themselves as “leaders.” The time has not yet come when it is simply an understood fact with no discussion necessary: women are leaders.

The women in the liberal science course were high achievers and felt privileged to be part of a rather elite group. After World War II, Purdue would be teeming with veterans returning to college thanks to the GI Bill. With its selective standards for admission, small class size, demanding courses, and outstanding faculty, the liberal science curriculum developed a reputation as an honors program. Male students clamored for admission. The first group of men selected by the same criteria as the women was admitted in 1947.

In 1985, Dorothy said of the program she helped create: “We really had something going on trying to offer at least a group of women something that was better adapted to what they needed and wanted than had been available before. That [liberal arts degree] got dropped, I must say, after President Hovde came.”

By 1953 under the Presidency Frederick L. Hovde, the School of Science would morph into what would be named the School of Science, Education, and the Humanities, with new separate departments of psychology and sociology, and—what seems misplaced today—a Division of Intercollegiate and Intramural Athletics, at that time a male-dominated entity. In A Century and Beyond, author Robert W. Topping states: “Hovde was always aware of the need to (as he put it) ‘educate the whole man.’ To him that meant exactly what it said: Purdue would achieve greatness only when its topflight scientific, engineering, and agricultural programs were accompanied by first-class undergraduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.”

Topping goes on to write: “One of the requirements for Hovde’s ‘educated man’ was that he at least try to understand or recognize the philosophical, cultural, political, emotional, spiritual, and traditional factors involved in the complex processes that underlie the society in which he would be expected to participate.”

It appears that women were no longer part of the equation that had begun as a liberal science program for exemplary females to learn about the role of science in contemporary life. The “ladies’ agreement” had been superseded by another type of gentlemen’s agreement.

In 1959, Purdue trustees approved the bachelor of arts degree. In The Hovde Years by Topping, he states: “A year later Hovde agreed, though it seemed with no great enthusiasm, to seek from the trustees ‘in principle’ approval of a Master of Arts degree. But he made it clear that Purdue’s involvement in such arts programs should be limited to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. This would not, Hovde felt, raise the ire of his I. U. colleagues.”

The stigma of the “gentlemen’s agreement” between Purdue and Indiana Universities that began at the turn of the twentieth century perpetuated into the 1960s, seemingly edging out women in the process, because as Dorothy stated, “gentlemen stick by their decisions.”

In a 1970 interview with Helen Schleman conducted by Professor R. B. Eckles of Purdue’s Department of History, the two discussed the liberal science program. Eckles revealed this telling piece of information about the dean of the School of Science, Education, and Humanities: “… may I say for the record that Dean W. L. Ayres destroyed every piece of paper relating to those wonderful women and girls; destroyed them in my presence. The record of their achievements was not kept purposely by the dean. I shall say no more than this, that his inability to support the program and his refusal to, in the terms of staff and of, shall we say, financial encouragement, was why the liberal science program was discontinued.”

Speculating on what could have been with a statement that rings true today, Helen replied: “One can’t help wondering what would have been the final outcome if the liberal science curriculum could have continued and could have expanded. It was ahead of its time; there’s no doubt about it. If we had in this country now great numbers of women who had the kind of background in science that that curriculum provided, we might not be in the difficulty that we’re in, in terms of our environment.”

The original intent of the liberal science degree—to answer the varied interests of women—had been lost to the winds of time. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, most Purdue female students would be enrolled in the School of Home Economics, and Dorothy’s dean of women successor, Helen, would carry the torch, ever vigilant in her attempt to break women out of the traditional mold.

In 1988, Dorothy Stratton, then age eighty-nine, spoke to a group of Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society members. At that time, liberal arts at Purdue had been given a mouthful of a name: Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE, pronounced “hissy”). It seems the University still feared repercussions if they called the offering “liberal arts.” Dorothy told the students in the audience her tale of liberal arts at Purdue and ended on a high note, saying, “I’m told … [our liberal science program] was the acorn into which the great school HSSE has grown. I think it’s great that Purdue now can give to its students the bachelor of arts degree.”

Purdue has walked a long and crooked path to a liberal arts degree since Amelia Earhart and Lillian Gilbreth encouraged its establishment, and Dorothy Stratton took on the initiative to beckon more women. Today, this field of study is available through Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts.

PART OF PURDUE’S ATTRACTION for Amelia was the school’s airport, the first to be owned and operated by a university. The campus airfield was made possible with land donated by Purdue Trustee David Ross. He believed that, along with the theory of aeronautics, Purdue should provide practical flight training. Amelia admired Purdue for offering reasonably priced flying instruction for students. In Soaring Wings, George Palmer Putnam wrote of his wife: “The matter of flying-lesson expense worried her. Whereas most girls were not able to earn as much money as boys—no one wanted feminine grease-monkeys around hangars to do the odd jobs which often pay a good part of a young man’s rudimentary training—they had to pay the same price as the boys for their lessons.”

Amelia especially valued how conclusions from laboratory tests conducted in the aeronautics department at Purdue could be immediately put into practice at the airfield southwest of campus. In George’s Soaring Wings, Amelia is quoted: “You see, my interest in aviation goes into every part of the industry. It isn’t flying alone. To be interested exclusively in pilots would be like being interested solely in the engineer in the railroad industry. It takes from forty to a hundred men on the ground to keep one plane in the air. That is from forty to a hundred jobs per plane—and I don’t think all those jobs need forever be held by men!”

It was George who first planted the idea of a “Purdue flying laboratory” in President Elliott’s mind. In the early part of 1935, Elliott asked George what he thought Amelia desired most in the field of research and education beyond the classroom. George recounted, “I told him she was hankering for a bigger and better plane, not only one in which she could go to far places farther and faster and more safely, but to use as a laboratory for research in aviation education and for technical experimentation.”

Amelia said of her husband, “Mr. Putnam, a practicing believer in wives doing what they do best, is an approving and helpful partner in all my projects.”

The January before Amelia came to Purdue, she flew from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, in her Lockheed Vega in eighteen hours and fifteen minutes, the first person to make this flight. A few months later, she flew from Burbank to Mexico City in thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes for a new record. That fall, Amelia unassumingly drove her steel gray Cord onto Purdue’s campus with her neck scarf billowing and two newly acquired world records under her belt, the belt that held up her avant-garde slacks.

Amelia yearned to pilot the longest flight of her aviation career, a world flight. While on the expedition, she wanted to test human reactions to flying—responses involving diet and altitude, fatigue, the effect of the stratosphere on people conditioned to lower altitudes, and the differences in the reactions of men and women to air travel, if any.

In the autumn of 1935, Elliott held a dinner party at the University-owned president’s home, a gray stucco, Spanish eclectic-style house with arched windows and entrance canopy, located many blocks from campus on South Seventh Street in Lafayette. At the party with several Purdue-connected guests, Amelia talked of her dreams for women and aviation. Before the evening was over, David Ross offered to donate fifty thousand dollars toward the cost of a plane that would be Amelia’s flying laboratory.

Additional donations in cash and equipment were received from J. K. Lilly of Eli Lilly Drug Company, Vincent Bendix, and manufacturers Western Electric, Goodrich, and Goodyear. A total of eighty thousand dollars comprised the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. The manufacturers hoped Amelia’s female example of flight would help their cause in promoting aviation to women, who at that time displayed “sales resistance” to air travel.

Last Flight is a book published in 1937 and written nearly entirely by Amelia from an accumulation of journals, logbooks, and letters scribbled in the cockpit as she flew her last flight over four continents. The narrative of her journey was also compiled from cables and telephone conversations. Originally, the book was to be named World Flight. Because she had promised her publishers that she would produce the manuscript promptly, Amelia mailed her written documentations to her husband from along her route as she traversed the globe. Amid the clouds, Amelia recalled her quest for the very airplane from which she wrote: “Where to find the tree on which costly airplanes grow, I did not know. But I did know the kind I wanted—an Electra Lockheed, big brother of my Vegas, with, of course, Wasp engines.… Such is the trusting simplicity of a pilot’s mind, it seemed ordained that somehow the dream would materialize. Once the prize was in hand, obviously there was one flight which I most wanted to attempt—a circumnavigation of the globe as near its waistline as could be.”

In the sky, her ship’s twin engines a droning backdrop, Amelia poetically penned her dream for girls: “I have harbored a very special ambition. The imaginary file card reads, ‘Tinkering For Girls Only.’ The plan is to endow a catch-as-catch-can machine shop, where girls may tinker to their heart’s content with motors, lathes, jigsaws, gadgets, and diverse hickies of their own creation. Where they may sprawl on their back, peering up into the innards of engines, and likely as not get oil in their hair.… And emerge somewhere in the scale between grease monkeys and inventors.”

Amelia’s thoughts were also on Purdue. While in the midst of her world-circling project cultivated by Elliott and Ross, she wrote, “The flight was to be the forerunner of activities at Purdue, where miraculously, there exists a real comprehension of the quaint viewpoint I have tried to indicate. Practical mechanical training, engineering and the like, is available without discouragement to women students there.… Which perhaps explains my enthusiasm for Purdue, womanwise as well as aviation-wise.”

Amelia took formal delivery of her Lockheed Electra on July 24, 1936, her thirty-ninth birthday. It was a standard commercial plane that Amelia had modified to her specifications. “It’s simply elegant,” Amelia said to mechanics who crowded around the gleaming all-metal craft, with its smooth curvatures and duel propellers poised to add sway like anticipant, graceful butter knives. “I could write poetry about this ship.”

President Elliott traveled to Los Angeles for a scheduled inspection of the flying laboratory in August. The “twin-motored ship” had been repainted in Purdue’s colors, gold and black.

Years later when Helen was in her eighties, she would give talks about Amelia and what it was like to know her and have her at Purdue. In 1984, Helen said, “When plans were announced for what turned out to be Miss Earhart’s last flight, there was tremendous interest and excitement on campus. We went out to the Purdue Airport to see the plane when Miss Earhart flew it in from California. We followed preparations for the world flight. We followed all of the changes in plans and delays in planning the trip. Finally, in March 1937, Miss Earhart left Purdue for California and then on to Honolulu.”

One can visualize Dorothy and Helen, colleagues and friends, assembling their charges, young women standing in their sweater sets and wool skirts, as the Indiana March wind whipped the grassy fields surrounding hanger number one at the Purdue Airport. They would gaze, blinking, at the polished Lockheed Electra, a metallic condor of the sky, and watch the gentle woman who would settle into the cockpit and study her maps that were, to Amelia, like adventures in and of themselves.

Reporters and admirers asked Amelia why she decided to attempt an around-the-world flight. Her answer was always, “Because I want to.”

In Last Flight, she expounded upon her usual brief answer, perhaps because she could express her reasoning best with pen and paper: “Here was shining adventure, beckoning with new experiences, added knowledge of flying, of peoples—of myself. I felt that with the flight behind me I would be more useful to me and to the program we had planned at Purdue.”

Helen goes on to explain the ups and downs of Amelia’s start to her circumventing the globe “at its waistline”: “Again a change in plans—a tire blew and a strut collapsed and the plane had to come back to California for repairs. The route of the flight was reversed. In May the plane was flown to Miami for a ‘shakedown cruise.’ Finally, on June 1, 1937, the long flight began. As the flight progressed, we all followed whatever scraps of information came via radio and in the press with the intense personal interest and concern.”

The mood on the Purdue campus must have been eager and electric. It was, in a sense, Purdue’s plane. Purdue’s Amelia. Purdue’s world flight. It was March 20, when Amelia’s plane “ground looped” and she crashed taking off in Hawaii, headed for Howland Island. As Helen said, Amelia returned the plane to the Lockheed factory in California for repairs.

President Elliott sent a telegram of encouragement to Amelia. On March 25, he wrote a letter to George, who was at Union Air Terminal in Burbank, California. Evidently, to help buoy his wife, George had suggested the telegram idea to Elliott. By this time the two men had become close, as indicated by the salutation of familiarity:

My dear G.P.:

Thanks for the clippings and for the suggestion of a special message for A.E. when she lands today. This has gone and reads as follows:

YOU ARE COMMISSIONED AND CHARGED TO GIVE A.E. A SPECIAL PURDUE GREETING WHEN SHE LANDS TODAY STOP HER COURAGEOUS EXPLOIT HAS GIVEN THRILL TO EVERY MEMBER OF THE BOILERMAKERS GUILD STOP THEY ARE ALL WITH HER TO THE SUCCESSFUL END OF THE FLIGHT

I hope it contains pep for her.

Four months later, Lae, New Guinea, would be Amelia’s final stop, where she reveled in the native tongue. She wrote on July 1, 1937, in Last Flight:

My only purchase at Lae besides gasoline has been a dictionary of Pidgin English for two shillings. I was well worth the price to discover that all native women are called Mary. The natives have their own name for everything. For instance airplanes are called “balus,” or “birds.” … My plane has acquired special distinction over other metal ones here, which have corrugated surfaces. The Lockheed is smooth and to the native resembles tins in which certain biscuits are shipped from England. Therefore it is known as the “biscuit box.”

Amelia and her biscuit box would attempt to cross eastward over the Pacific to land on Howland Island, along a route never traveled before by airplane. She wrote before taking off, “Shall be glad when we have the hazards of its navigation behind us.”

Rather than behind her, the hazards would forever be Amelia’s mystery and legacy.

Decades later, Helen described hearing the news that Amelia was lost at sea: “On July 2, the final radio message came. It was picked up by a New Guinea radio station: ‘circling … cannot see island … gas running low.’ There was no more word.”

The Purdue community collectively displayed shock. Yet hope. There was always hope. Maybe Amelia would be found. Helen continued: “We were all sad and unbelieving. It did not seem possible that the vibrant, beautiful person we had known would not return. She will always be a symbol of high courage to those of us who were fortunate enough to know her.”

Until she passed away in 1992, Helen kept a newspaper clipping with the headline “Earhart’s Radio Mixed Bared.” Dorothy had scrawled a note at the top and evidently given it to Helen. She wrote, “Have you seen this explanation? Certainly tragic and apparently needless.”

The July 8, 1937 news story stated that the tragedy was due to a communication failure with a coast guard cutter, which cruised along one of the loneliest stretches of the earth’s surface to guide Amelia:

Far from the scene of the search for Amelia Earhart and her navigator on the coral reefs and watery wastes of the Pacific, maritime radio experts today piece together the story of a radio mixup which may spell the doom of the fliers.

Briefly the mixup was this:

The coast guard cutter Itasca stationed near Howland Island as a safety measure when the Earhart plane zoomed across the sea from New Guinea expected Amelia would broadcast in code on 500 kilocycles. The Itasca was equipped to take a directional bearing on the plane only if Miss Earhart was sending in code over 500 kilocycles.

But Amelia, before leaving on her globe-circling flight, had scrapped her 500-kilocycle equipment. She could send only on high frequencies.

Amelia was quoted regarding the scrapping of the 500-kilocycle equipment: “It means we would have to take along a 250-foot trailing antenna, which would have to be reeled out after every takeoff and reeled in before each landing.… The antenna would be one more thing to worry about, and we have enough things to think of already.”

The commander of the Itasca was unaware that Amelia’s cherished Lockheed Electra could not receive the signal sent from his ship.

On July 16, President Elliott sent a Western Union telegram to George, who was in Burbank, California, the text of which read:

SHE WOULD NOT WANT US TO GRIEVE AND WEEP YET WE ARE IN THE DEEPEST DEPTHS OF SADNESS STOP WE SHALL LONG MOURN THIS GALLANT ONE WHOSE LIFE WAS A COURAGEOUS ADVENTURE SHE WOULD HAVE A HEROINES PART IN ANY AGE STOP WHEN YOU ARE ABLE PLEASE LET ME KNOW YOUR PLANS SO THAT WE MAY MEET TO CONSIDER HOW TO CARRY ON

Nearly forty years later, Dorothy told her friend Sally Watlington where she was on July 2, 1937, a moment etched in time, just prior to America’s most patriotic of celebrations, Independence Day. Dorothy was at a meeting in the Purdue Memorial Union when word came—Amelia Earhart was lost at sea. Those in the meeting sat dazed, then mechanically and without a word, they gathered their papers. Still not speaking, Dorothy and the group left the room, walked down the terrazzo tiled hallways of the Union, where Amelia had once walked, and out into the summer sunshine.

When asked how she felt upon hearing Amelia was missing, Dorothy thought of her famous, fearless friend whom she had hosted in her home with waffles and talks of “cabbages and kings.” She gave a one-word answer: “Devastated.”