Bryn Mawr College

“ We lived there in a world of our own creation—a land of dreams. Our dreams for Bryn Mawr may always be realized; they are never shown to be impossible."
"Well, really," exclaimed Louise, "you seem to be getting very high falutin, all of you. My feeling about college is that if it hadn't been for my friends it would have been a hateful place—all hard work and nothing else. It's the friendships you make there that count."
"To be sure they count," said Edith, "but [Pg 34] you might say the same of boarding-school. ”

“ In the last calendar of Bryn Mawr College, the Department of Education, in announcing its courses, makes the following common-sense remarks:
"It is the purpose of the department to offer to students intending to become teachers an opportunity to obtain a technical preparation for their profession. Hitherto practical training has been thought necessary for teachers of primary schools only, but similar training is very desirable for teachers in high schools and colleges also. ”

“ Education: The two great universities, Cornell at Ithaca and Columbia in New York City, admit women to all departments and grant them the full degrees. In Cornell they recite in the same classes with the men students, and have the additional advantage of a residential hall on the campus. There are no women on the faculty. Dr. M. Carey Thomas, president of Bryn Mawr College, has been a member of the board of trustees for several years. ”

“ The College Graduate.—Many of our modern critiques of the birth-rate situation make much of the fact that our college graduates as a group are scarcely reproducing themselves. According to Davenport, Bryn Mawr College between 1888 and 1913 has graduated 1,193 bachelors of arts, but these women have produced up to January, 1913, only 263 girls to take their place in the next generation. He also points out that statistics on some of the graduate classes of Harvard of twenty years ago or earlier show that they are little more than maintaining themselves ”

“ Wealth and social distinction, good-breeding and beauty were hers without an effort, without a college education; yet she knew well that there was something in her that was due to Bryn Mawr. In striving to express this she had come to Katherine Brewster, sure that from her she would get the explanation. ”

“ This book is an attempt to show some of her incarnations and some typical scenes of Bryn Mawr life. College life is not dramatic and college stories have no great dramatic interest, unless they introduce elements foreign to the campus. ”

“ It is beginning, moreover, to be an every-day matter for women to receive a college education. There are already three well-filled colleges of high rank exclusively their own, and the new Bryn Mawr bids fair to be a powerful rival to Vassar, Smith, and Wellesley. Many of the colleges for men are open to them ”

“ At no time in life is the love of beauty at once so delicate and so keen as in those years when one is eligible to college life. To foster this perhaps latent appreciation by a direct contact with the beauties of nature is one of the opportunities offered by Bryn Mawr, Vassar, Wellesley, Smith and other well-known women’s colleges.
The three or four years in college among a hundred or more other girls often form one of the happiest and most fruitful periods of a girl’s life. She makes interesting and valuable friendships. ”

“ Ballantyne who think the fact that women will do it adds a most unfortunate complexity [Pg 268] to modern life; and the burden of proof that college is the right thing for us lies with us. I don't mean that we are to claim more for it than it can do, or pretend to more than we have, but to be so broad-spirited and alert and interested in everything, that we shall simply convince these people that college training is the best thing that ever happened to women—especially Bryn Mawr training. I'm going on a crusade against all infidels of the genus Ballantyne. ”

“ Bryn Mawr is willing to train girls not only to be cultivated but to secure good positions, as teachers.
But the teaching trade is getting choked. There is too much supply. Girls are going to college in hordes. Graduating from college, looking for work, there is usually just one kind of work toward which they are mentally alert. Their college experience has seldom roused their minds toward any other kind of work. They start to teach. They drug the market. ”

“ The four leading women's colleges,—Vassar, 1861, Smith, 1875, Wellesley, 1875, Byrn Mawr, 1885, stand among the sixty leading colleges in wealth, equipment, teachers, students, and curricula. Indeed, it is said that a woman who completes the course at Bryn Mawr does more work than is required in any man's college.
Women have proved capacity and desire for training. In 1872 America had 50 college women to each million population; in 1899, 323. In 1900 a third of all the college students in America were women: 4,000 in women's colleges ”

“ Each has in addition a director of the gymnasium, but only at Bryn Mawr is she a medical graduate. None of these directors is given the rank of professor in the faculty, but they are better qualified for their positions than are many of the male directors. The Woman's College of Baltimore is the best organized, with a professor of anatomy, physiology, hygiene, and physical training, and two instructors in physical training. ”

“ Among those institutions giving an economic course in the freshman year are some small and some large institutions (some of the latter being Stanford, New York University, Pennsylvania, Bryn Mawr, and the state universities of California, Iowa, Nebraska, North Dakota, Colorado, Utah) . Frequently the elementary course given to freshmen is in matter and method historical and descriptive, rather than theoretical, and is planned to precede a more rigid course in the principles. ”

“ In the East girls get their higher education for the most part in colleges of their own. Smith College for instance has no connection with any of the men's universities. Nor has Vassar nor Bryn Mawr. These institutions have their own staffs, their own courses and examinations, their own rules, and confer their own degrees. Barnard College, on the other hand, is closely connected with Columbia University, occupying much the same position as Girton and St. Margaret's Hall do with regard to Cambridge and Oxford, scarcely as intimately joined to Columbia as Trinity Hall is to Dublin University. ”

“ Just what labor education turns into when it is superintended by the existing educational authorities was amusingly 446demonstrated at Bryn Mawr, a very aristocratic college for women located near Philadelphia, and having the president of an insurance company for its treasurer, and for its grand duke the president of a steel company and a trust company, vice-president of a national bank and director of a sugar company. ”

“ Until now the literary efforts of the students have concerned themselves with external matters rather than with introspection. Perhaps this is due to an instinctive reticence we Bryn Mawrtyrs have wherever our feelings are deeply stirred. We can joke about ourselves and our traditions as we do in The Fortnightly Philistine. But when we come to speak seriously to the outside world, as in The Lantern, we confine ourselves for the most part to subjects of general literary interest, practically ignoring the [Pg 6] college atmosphere. ”

“ For her the oak stairways up from the cloisters led to anchorites' cells where men worked through endless, still, summer days. She was very young then and only in Oxford during the long vacation. On her return she first saw Bryn Mawr and then she said, with entire conviction, that to be there would be very well. The long low buildings half covered with creepers suggested, as she saw these also deserted and on a summer day, her dream of life at Oxford. ”

“ He is also a member of Sons of the Revolution, the Philadelphia and Merion Cricket Clubs of Philadelphia, Century, University and Engineers' Clubs of New York, and the Metropolitan Club of Washington. Residence : Bryn Mawr, Pa.
Emerson, Charles Phillips, physician and professor of medicine of Indianapolis, Ind., was born Sept. 4, 1872, in Methuen, Mass. He has been associate in medicine and resident physician in the Johns Hopkins University of Baltimore; and assistant professor of medicine in Cornell University of Ithaca. ”

“ Only Bryn Mawr and Radcliffe lay any special stress on the advanced critical work of the graduates. In Smith, Vassar, and Wellesley it is mostly a matter of assimilation, and the standard of scholarship is not much higher than that of the German Arbiturientenexamen, together with possibly one or two semesters of the philosophical faculty. In Wellesley, women are almost the only teachers; while in Bryn Mawr almost all are men, and in Smith the teachers are both men and women. ”

“ The grass grows lush wherever it can gain hold, and, not content with having its own way on green and campus, is forever attempting the conquest of path and road. The warm red bricks of the college buildings are well-nigh hidden by ivy, which, too, is an ardent expansionist. And where neither grass nor ivy can subjugate, soft, velvety moss reigns humbly.
In the year 1901, which is the period of this story, the enrolment in all departments at Erskine was close to six hundred students. The freshman class, as had been the case for many years past, was the largest in the history of the college. ”

“ He never spared himself. He forgot himself, but he never forgot the college. His works do follow him. These works which remain with us are the strong and united faculty which he organized, and which he inspired with his own high ideals, the noble standard of scholarship to which he elevated the curriculum, the beautiful campus, which is a wonder of improvement when we contrast it with what it was when his hands first touched it, and the example of industry and energy which his life has furnished. ”

“ There is no opportunity given to the Harvard pedagogical students for actual teaching; but the connection brought about between the college department and the secondary schools, by the constant attendance of students in the school-rooms of the neighbourhood, may possibly develop into a system wherein trained students may act as substitutes in these schools. Quite apart, however, from this possible future connection, there is even now an important practical relationship between Harvard University and some of the secondary schools—viz., that of supervision. ”

“ The first ten years of the institution were marked by a singularly rapid growth, considering the fact that they included the darkest days of the Civil war, when nearly every male student was drawn from the college halls to the service of his country. At the end of the decade the faculty numbered eight professors and instructors, and 375 students were enrolled, fifty-one of whom were in college classes, the largest enrollment of collegiate students in the state, unless at the State University. ”

“ For if you will note, the work that I did was the work that anyone can do and it was up to and through my high school, subfreshman and freshman years in college that I had such a hard struggle. And it was after this time that I ever received a cent for preaching. Moreover, for two years of my time at Baylor I had to pay my tuition, one year by working in the Library, the other with a scholarship. And at Brown University no free tuition is given; preachers and all pay alike.
There is a college education for every man. ”

“ The undue excitement and spirit of rivalry fostered is foreign to the true idea of an earnest student life. The college is no monastery to make the student a recluse, but it should be a place of solitude, a modern cloister, where the student may be kept in partial isolation and away from the turbulent stream of public life and distracting social influences. The student may keep in the midst of the current of actual modern thought and life without sacrificing the quiet seclusion which is an essential requirement for the best scholarship. ”

“ In the language of President Thwing, it may be said that "it is to the people that the college and university desire to give more than they receive from the people. It is not unjust to say that the people are debtors. The community has given to Yale, and to Princeton, and to Harvard, much, but Yale, and Princeton, and Harvard have given to the community more. For the college and the university are set to hold up the worth of things to the mind, and these things are the worthiest. ”

“ No rank, no class of men, is unrepresented. The school was of the people." There is nothing in history to parallel the heroic spirit and boldness of these early settlers in attempting to found a college, surrounded as the people were with poverty, scanty subsistence, and savage enemies. They did not realize thePage 40 wisdom of their liberality and sacrifice and its influence upon the future civilization of the Western World. Harvard College was located at Cambridge, with a single building, on less than three acres of land. ”

“ Sir Christopher Wren, a warm personal friend of Barrow, was selected as the architect, and placed his services at the disposal of the College without remuneration. His original drawings are included in a collection of his designs preserved at All Souls’ College, Oxford, and by the kindness of that Society we have been allowed to take photographs of the plans which concern us. These relate to two plans for our library and one for a university commencement-house. The two plans for Trinity were made not later than 1675 ”