The dean of women

Foreword

This book upon the position of the dean of women is, I believe, the first to appear upon this phase of educational work. With the multitude of books upon almost every aspect of education, this fact in itself is significant. The position of dean of women is a new one ; the duties relating to the post have not been defined ; they are in rapid flux ; they are not the same in one institution as they are in another. Dean Lois Kimball Mathews clearly analyzes the qualifications for the position, the opportunities offered by it, and what may be accomplished through it.

The book is written primarily from the coeducational point of view. The report of the United States Commissioner of Education for 1913 shows that the number of women in coeducational universities and colleges was somewhat more than 73,000, and in women's colleges was in excess of 24,000. In addition to the above there were about 1300 women in the graduate schools and in special courses in the vi FOREWORD

colleges which are regarded as exclusively for men. Therefore the treatment covers the problem of the dean of women for three fourths of the women in higher institutions of learning.

The judicial student of education cannot but appreciate the superior advantages of the coeducational institutions in certain respects, and of the women's colleges in other respects. However, it is clear that the duties of the dean of women in a coeducational institution are of a more difficult character than in the women's colleges; for, in addition to considering the strictly collegiate aspects of work, curricular and extra-curricular, the vastly complex social problem enters.

That there are benefits in wholesome association of men and women in the classroom can scarcely be doubted. That there are mutual benefits in reasonable social intercourse cannot be questioned ; but, as with other good things, there is a tendency to excess on the part of many. This tendency results in regulation and restraint; and these always present difficult problems.

The vivid description by Dean Mathews of the existing situation for women in higher

FOREWORD vii

educational institutions and her clear discussion of the problems arising in connection with this situation cannot but be of ofreat assistance to the deans of women who are struggling to clarify their ideas, define their authority, and secure definite results.

Charles R. Van Hise, President of the University of Wisconsin.

Madison, Wisconsin, April, 1915.

Contents

I. The Dean of Women: Her Position 1

II. The Problem of Living Conditions, and their relation to social Conditions 40

III. The Problem of Student Employ-

Chapter I The Dean Of Women: Her Position

There is in almost every coeducational institution in the United States an official whose chief duty is usually vaguely stated to be " the care and supervision of women students." So unstandardized is the position this official occupies that even the title varies from that of " dean of women " to " adviser of women/' "preceptress/' or even "lady principal " ; furthermore^ in one case at least, the " dean of women " is a man ! The position itself is often but that of an apotheosized chaperon ; it varies from the place of an administrative officer, on a par in importance and dignity with deans of the various colleges which make up the whole university, to the mere presence in a community of a gracious and charming woman who " loves girls."

The duties of the position likewise run a gamut of all known relations which an older woman bears toward young men and women, from those of a lecturer in the classroom to those of a housekeeper in a dormitory. The position is never the same in any two institutions, nor has it usually many points of resemblance to the deanship in those colleges whose student body is made up exclusively of women. The injunction ordinarily given to a new incumbent is, "Go ahead and make of the position what you can. There are no prescribed duties." And the new appointee wanders from institution to institution to see what other deans of women are making of their positions, finally bringing up at her own office door in a pitiable state of bewilderment and discouragement. The few who have brought the position to any sort of standard and real organization are besieged by letters and calls from others who have entered or are just entering the work, and even from a few hardy and enthusiastic young souls who desire "to prepare to be deans of women." The present discussion is meant rather to be suggestive of new points of view and provocative of thought and argument than as a jeremiad, or to settle for all time any problem.

It is difficult for us who take the higher education of women as a matter of course to realize how recently the groups of college and university women have come in large numbers into the community. Half a century covers almost the span of it, and twenty-five years would inclose the period of tremendous growth in the number of women going to college. The first students in the colleges exclusively for women (like Vassar), or the first women in the coeducational institutions (like Oberlin), betook themselves to those walls because of a passionate eagerness for learning, or because of the necessity of bread-winning. Going to college was not a fashionable pursuit, and the seminary or finishing school was believed by most parents to meet in ample measure the intellectual and social needs of their daughters. So long as young women went to college with a serious purpose, the problem of discipline was negligible, and the few pranks that were played were easily punished by the president of the institution. About twenty-five years ago, however, a change in the character of student bodies became evident. Although the number of serious-minded students was as large in the aggregate, it was reduced relatively by the influx o£ a large number of young people whose parents had resources in wealth and in leisure, and who felt, often vaguely enough, that the effects of a college education were desirable. The era had begun of those who came "for the college life " (meaning, usually, every thing outside the classroom !) or because of social aspiration, or what not.

Coincident with the surging in of this tidal wave of irresponsible joyousness came a change in the character of the faculty, especially in the women's colleges. The demands for teachers who had higher degrees, who had done graduate work abroad, who were competent to carry on research work and publish books, became keener, and since no one person could do all things, the faculty became more concerned with the intellectual aspects and less with the disciplinary side of college life. Just at the time, therefore, when the problem of the moral, spiritual, and social life of the students was becoming more complex, the intimate relation between pupil and teacher was breaking down. When students in women's colleges petitioned for self-government it was granted with a good deal of readiness, not only because of its theoretical value, but also because of its practical advantages. The inauguration of self-government associations marked a new era in college administration, because it brought in a different method of handling student problems, at a time when those problems were partaking of the rapidly increasing complexity of our whole social life.

Just as the composition of the student body in the women's college changed, so did the group of women students in coeducational institutions take on a different character. In addition to the sober-minded young woman who came to get an education like that of her brothers, there came in the "social butterfly," the seeker for " culture " without intellectual labor, the "superman." The college began to reflect the relaxed discipline of the family, the lowered spiritual tone of many communities, the complicated problems of inexperienced, unrestrained young men and women thrown together socially without adequate guidance. Parents began to criticize the state universities especially for lack of supervision of women students and to compare them unfavorably in that regard with Eastern women's colleges. Self-government associations like those in the women's colleges where every student is ipso facto sl member of the organization were unknown in coeducational institutions. Committees of the faculty dealt with student problems, often without any large enthusiasm, for the all-round teacher who was vitally interested in student problems and student affairs was giving way to the enthusiast in research whose relations to students were often confined within the classroom walls.

The problem was the same in both the coeducational institution and the women's college, — a changing and enlarging student body with less interest in intellectual things, a more complex and elaborate social life within the college, less intimate relations between faculty and students, and more problems of so-called discipline. The woman's college met the situation in part by self-government associations ; the coeducational institutions met it so far as their women students were concerned in quite another way. Then it was that the ^' dean (or adviser) of women" came into being — to meet a practical need, a social requirement. There had always been in the smaller coeducational colleges, especially the denominational ones, a " preceptress " or a " lady principal." These institutions had cared for their women students ordinarily in a dormitory, where the preceptress presided, and where she also looked after the manners and morals of her charges. She frequently taught such subjects as Biblical literature, English literature, or the history of art. If young men took their meals in the dormitory, and so came in contact with the preceptress, she sometimes wielded an influence over the masculine part of the community as well.

But in the state universities dormitories were almost unknown, and where there was one, the preceptress had no authority outside its walls. The Greek-letter organizations, to which a limited number of young women belonged, frequently occupied separate houses, with a chaperon who was often a figurehead. These young women exercised among their members a more or less mild form of self-government by dint of public opinion. The rest of the women students were free to do about as they pleased, subject only to such restrictions as the faculty might put on men and women alike. The more thoughtful parents and members of faculties were aware that young women must have more adequate safeguarding in social matters than were necessary for young men ; that indiscretion and folly meant a far bitterer repentance for one sex than for the other ; and that a harmless prank in a gossiping community might have a tragic ending out of all proportion to its thoughtless beginning. Moreover, where there was inadequate provision for living quarters, there was a strong feeling that it was necessary to have some person in authority who could arrange for and supervise in some fashion the lodgingand boarding-houses in which young women must pass three quarters of every year of college life. It was because of this complex situation that there came to coeducational institutions the idea of an official whose duty should be, as has been said, " the care and supervision of the young women."

It was very natural that this official should occupy a position which differed both from that held by the preceptress of a dormitory in a small coeducational institution and from that occupied by the dean of a woman's college. The machinery for arranging courses of study, granting permission to carry a larger or smaller amount of work than was required of the average student, framing entrance requirements, and in other ways carrying out the educational policy of the institution — all this was provided for by the of&ces of deans of various colleges and by registrars before the new official came into the community. Because of the hard-and-fast character of college administration it was extremely difficult to loosen any joint or fit in any new cog. Hence the new appendage to the faculty frequently came in under the harmless and inane title of '' adviser of women " — with her title and her position equally anomalous. Among certain groups of faculty, students, and even trustees themselves, the new adviser of women was received resentfully and even antagonistically, for it was felt by many on all sides that when students came to college they were no longer boys and girls, but were young men and young women, quite capable of looking after themselves. The adviser of women had her own way to make and her position to form in the midst of difficulties of all sorts.

Fortunately a few institutions realized that in a community where the measure of a professor's power and effectiveness both inside and outside the classroom came most largely through his intellectual attainments combined with his personality, it would be necessary for an adviser of women to hold a position on the faculty. As a consequence a search was in a few cases made for women with college degrees and records for post-graduate work which would enable them to be appointed to professorial rank and to give courses on a parity with those offered by men. It was in such appointments that the title "dean of women" was apt to be chosen rather than " adviser of women/' and the difference in nomenclature was most significant. When the title combined the recognition of the dual character of the position as dean of women and (let us say) assistant professor of classical philosophy, the situation became yet clearer. But an obstacle was then encountered in the antipathy, open or veiled, to the appointment of women on faculties composed almost exclusively of men. Many institutions which deny stoutly any theoretical objections to women per se on faculties, when they go a-seeking new incumbents for positions do not make strenuous endeavors to have laid before their impartial eyes full lists of available candidates drawn from both sexes. The consequence is that men seem to be the only persons eligible and the ranks of new instructors are filled overwhelmingly from the male sex. Appointed under such circumstances, the new dean and professor had to make good against tremendous odds in which personality and charm, valuable as such assets are, weighed out of all proportion to their real importance. No one can overestimate the advantage of possessing a magnetic, sympathetic, charming personality, when one's lines are laid in a community of young men and women who are impressionable, idealistic, enthusiastic, and given over to hero-worship. Nor are faculties immune where such a personality is concerned, stoutly though they may gird themselves up against such a dire influence when it is incarnated in a woman. But that one should owe the success of one's of&cial life and the tenure of one 's position to the possession of such a personality means putting the emphasis in the wrong place. Yet when one is a dean of students and not a dean of a college, when one 's work is so largely personal even when it is also administrative, personality must weigh rather heavily in the scale.

As time has gone on, it has become increasingly clear that more is needed as equipment for " the care and supervision of young women " than personal charm combined with a love of girls. For desirable as such equipment may be, young women — and young men also — in a college community look for the sign of certain definite intellectual and spiritual attainments, and for tactful, skillful leadership born of large-mindedness and wide experience before they give to any man or woman their unqualified, enthusiastic, loyal support. Very few state universities were wise enough to see this situation at the beginning, and a number are yet unconvinced. One prominent institution began with a dean of women who was also an assistant professor, after her departure allowed the whole position to lapse, later filled it with an adviser of women who did not teach, and now has a dean of women who is also an associate professor. In that way only, perhaps, can experience be gained as to the best method of working out a problem whose solution is at best a difficult one.

One must not forget to note the part which the Association of Collegiate Alumnse has played in setting unequivocally before a number of institutions the necessity under which they have lain of appointing deans of women who shall be teachers as well as administrators. But the conversion of many institutions has been slow, and a few are still laboring in a light which is dim but not necessarily religious.

The inception of the office of dean of women in state universities may be assumed to have lain in a practical need and a vague fumbling about to meet it. Out of that earlier situation, however, there has now emerged a large necessity with more precise definitions, and the position of dean of women should have grown and developed in corresponding degree. This large necessity is concerned first and foremost with the intellectual life of the women students. A quarter of a century has seen an extraordinary multiplication of college courses and an increasing differentiation in the character o£ institutions open to women. It is natural that coeducational institutions should proceed more slowly in meeting the situation for women than they do for men. Courses which are definitely planned to meet specific requirements which shall fit men for professions of various sorts, medicine, law, engineering of all kinds, agriculture, and so forth, are provided in most institutions with ease and with alacrity. But these courses are primarily for men, and it requires some hardihood and a good deal of conviction on the part of women to bring their enrollment in these courses. On the other hand, courses for women in institutional management, in secretarial work, in social service, the coeducational institution finds it difficult to provide.

The danger is that coeducational institutions will continue to be in the future as the vast majority have been in the past, — institutions for men, with requirements set at a man's pace and to meet his needs, where women are admitted, rather than institutions which provide with equal readiness, ingenuity, and enthusiasm courses for both sexes. To be more explicit : women's emergence into new and highly specialized aspects of economic and professional life has been so meteoric that it has been difficult to provide courses which would fit them for these various vocations, partly because of the constantly shifting character of the vocations themselves and the consequent vagueness in the matter of preparation for entering them, and partly because men administrators in coeducational institutions have attempted almost single-handed to work out women's problems. Nor has this situation — that of men's organizing or ratifying courses for women — been due wholly to the fact that men are in the preponderance on faculties in coeducational institutions ; it has been brought about also because of the small number of college-bred women competent to work out vocational training along any other line than that of teaching. The impetus to preparation for other occupations than that of teaching has frequently come from women who were not themselves college-bred, but who saw by practical experience the immense value of having as a foundation for these occupations the background of discipline and information which, when it attains its purpose, the college affords. By far the greatest number of women who go into occupations other than teaching have to-day to prepare themselves for these occupations — if definite preparation be made at all — in especially equipped schools and colleges, whose single-minded aim is vocational training.

Just here is to the writer's mind where the position of dean of women has greatest possibilities — in making her, so far as she may be, an expert on women's education in a coeducational institution. This would not mean that every college to which women are admitted should be vocational, nor that vocational work should invariably begin in the freshman year. It is desirable that colleges like Yassar and Bryn Mawr should keep their curriculum clear of such courses ; it is equally imperative that coeducational institutions shall preserve intact a college of letters and science. But even in a course whose main purpose is intellectual discipline and training one may, from the immense opportunities offered, select those which will form an adequate foundation upon which ojie may rear a vocational superstructure, and still get the broad outlook and beginnings of cultivation for mind and spirit which the non-vocational college course must give if it is to fulfill in any way its primary function. The point is that in state universities more especially where all classes and kinds of young women should be prepared for life if the taxpayer is to be convinced that he is not educating the favored few, — and those few he may feel "out of their class/' — vocational courses must be provided side by side with the traditional courses. There has come to be a considerable differentiation in our women's colleges: for example, the type represented by Vassar College, from which vocational work is rigidly debarred ; another like Simmons College, where vocational work may proceed at once upon the basis of the high-school course; and a third like Margaret Morrison Carnegie School, where two years of vocational training follow two years of foundation training on a broad scale.

Must not the state university at least provide all these types ? Must it not maintain its vocational college alongside of its college of letters and science for those girls to whom six or seven years of preparation beyond the high school are impossible ? Must it not also provide a middle ground, where two years of a broad foundation may be overlaid by two years of vocational training? These are questions which a dean of women may well consider within the realm of her thinking, and their solution within the field of her endeavor ; they are questions which coeducational institutions must answer, yet cannot do so adequately without women's advice and aid. No " glorified chaperon " will be able to grasp the situation and cope with it ; no woman who merely " loves girls " in a vague, emotional fashion will be able to convince a faculty of men or a body of hard-headed trustees of the necessity under which they labor of meeting the present economic, social, intellectual, and spiritual needs of women. More than charm and natural social gifts are required of a leader in women's education ; the times call for an intellectual, spiritual, and social equipment of the highest order on the part of those who are to contribute a sane, clear-cut, and large-minded point of view. If one were to follow up this function of a dean of women to its ideal conclusion, one would say that a woman's point of view might well be taken in a coeducational institution where problems of men's education^ moral and intellectual, were discussed. One feels a profound pity and sympathy for the father who, because death or incompetence has deprived him of his helpmate, struggles single-handed to rear his family of girls and boys. He is indeed fortunate if all his female relatives do not rush in a body to his rescue from an excess of zeal and compassion for him ! Why should one expect men to cope alone with the complex problem which the education of young men presents to-day in the lax atmosphere which too often surrounds them both at home and at college ? The men's college can take care of itself ; — it has for a number of hundred years and will continue to do so. But if a coeducational institution is to bring to young men the refining and ennobling and cultivating influence which its most zealous adherents claim for it, then the woman who is brouo^ht in to be a leader for the girls can scarcely be delegated to the lowest seat in the congregation. It would be difficult to determine just how far many a young man's ideal of women as well-bred, well-trained, thinking persons has been lowered by the attitude of a faculty which patronizes if it does not ignore the woman who has been called in to take over problems of discipline which men did not care to consider.

There are exceptional institutions which make their dean of women assistant chairman of their student affairs committee, with the possibility of acting as chairman in the absence of the regular incumbent. Every institution ought so to recognize its dean of women, for if she be the right sort of woman she ought to have that place. She ought further to have a definite opportunity for giving to the community whatever experience and advice she may be able to muster in solving all problems, whether they concern men or women or the relations of each to the other. I have said that this is ideal ; so it is. But it is also the part of wisdom and of fair play. Men and women bring out of an unlike experience and quite diverse traditions different points of view and different reactions upon the same question. Why not have the advantage of two minds rather than one? And be it said by the way, that men do not care for a man's mind in a woman's frame, although, in an excess of complimentary speech, they may so designate what they consider an exceptionally clear mental attitude; a "perfectly good " woman's mind is something no woman need be ashamed to possess nor any man reluctant to recognize.

It is curious that colleges should be slower to recoo^nize the value in their councils of women's experience of life than are committees of business men engaged in rehabilitating a city or a slum district. But coeducational institutions are prone to intrench themselves behind a high wall of conservatism, and, in a passionate endeavor to preserve what of culture and of high-mindedness they may, fail to admit new reinforcements to their garrison, although these reinforcements would immensely strengthen their position.

It has been stated above that the office of dean of women was created partly because of a feeling that young women in coeducational institutions should be cared for in a fashion commensurate with that in vogue in women's colleges. Yet the dean in the women's college and the dean of women have such very unlike positions and such dissimilar functions that it is entirely possible to differentiate the places the two occupy in their respective communities.

In the first place, the dean of a women's college is very like the dean of any one college in a coeducational university. She is ex officio chairman of those committees which look after entrance requirements, accredited schools, students on probation, etc., with this work as her prime object. She may or she may not have charge of the housing problem, employment work, discipline, and similar aspects of the social and moral welfare of the students. She rarely teaches. But she has no superior officer save the trustees and the president, and she is responsible only to them. The only appeal from her decisions is to the faculty and to the president. She has but one public opinion to meet on the part of the student body, and that is women's opinion. Her position is quite clearly defined and unquestionably important. Her success is measured largely by her administrative capacity ; her personality and the possession of tact and sympathy are valuable but not invaluable assets for her position.

On the other hand, the dean of women, as we have seen, is but one dean among a group ; she is, moreover, a dean of students, and not of a college. She has to compromise with and conform to the wishes and requirements of a whole group of men deans whose work is more specialized than hers and is tending toward a different object. A fractious student may appeal from her decision to a dozen other authorities besides the president and the faculty. Since a woman is apt to be more rigid and unyielding in disciplinary matters and more uncompromising where questions of student morals are concerned than are her masculine colleagues, her decisions are more apt to be appealed from and her authority overruled than would be the case with her confrere in a women's college. But what complicates the situation most of all is that she finds a threefold student public opinion, each part of which differs from the other ; for she has to meet the opinion of the women students, the opinion of the men students, and a third opinion which is a composite of both. The final situation she has to meet is probably a modification of the last-named, since one significant feature of coeducation to-day is the apparent reluctance of the majority of women students to think or to act independently. I am not now speaking of individual students, but of the whole mass of women students as at present constituted. They tend to play men's sports, to attend men's games, to rush to men's mass meetings, to underestimate the fun in " girl parties " where no men are present, and to interest themselves in the amusing politics of the men rather than to develop any life or opinion which is distinctly their own.

If the result were a really coeducational society in a really coeducational community — one would feel that the situation might be quite right and proper ; it would at least be logical. But when it seems to result in less initiative and less ability to deal with women's problems than is developed in the women's college, is not the situation somewhat deplorable ? For when all is said and done, the majority of young women are going after college into their own homes and are for the most part to find the bulk of their associations with women and children. It is the business of a dean of women to develop and help the young women to develop their own organizations and their own social life so far as to achieve this end; that by these means an apprenticeship may be served for the great business of living. She must then undertake to form and lead the first of the three forms of public opinion noted above — that of the women students themselves — and to guide the third, the composite of men's and women's reaction on a situation. Student opinion, intolerant, impatient, and immature though it be, is everywhere wholesome and sound if one can get to the core of it. But in a women's college it is almost wholly formed by the mere presence of the student body; it is shaped by the constant contact with administrators and teachers which the somewhat isolated life characteristic of most such institutions fosters and by the daily meeting shoulder to shoulder in classroom and chapel. In the state university especially, and still more particularly in the ones which have the largest attendance, there are no such effective instruments for moulding and directing student thought and ideals. It is just at this point that the largest aggregations of students are likely to lose ; the working of mob psychology finds all too fertile a field, and the conservation of traditions of good breeding, clean fun, intellectual attainments, and high morality becomes ever more difficult. The problem is stupendous any vray you look at it. Its solution calls for all the God-given powers of faculty and students alike.