Mount Holyoke College

“ At Mount Holyoke seminary for women, created by the genius and devotion of Mary Lyon, and at Oberlin college, where the best New England tradition had been transplanted—there had been long and earnest trial of giving the students work by which to partially pay their expenses. ”

“ Clark University (1889, devoted wholly to graduate instruction until 1902, when Clark College was added) , at Worcester, are important institutions. Two Roman Catholic schools are maintained—Boston College (1863) and the College of the Holy Cross (1843) , at Worcester. Of various institutions for the education of women, Mount Holyoke (1837) at South Hadley, Smith College (1875) at Northampton, Wellesley College (1875) at Wellesley near Boston, Radcliffe College (1879) in connexion with Harvard at Cambridge and Simmons College (1899) at Boston, are of national repute. ”

“ Eventually, when our preparatory schools are higher, all our colleges for women will have as difficult entrance examinations as Harvard and Yale.
The housework at Mount Holyoke Seminary requires but half an hour each day for each of the two hundred and ninety-seven pupils. Much time is spent wisely in the gymnasium, and in boating on the lake near by. Habits of punctuality, thoroughness, and order are the outcome of life in this institution. An endowment of twenty thousand dollars, called "the Mary Lyon Fund," is now being raised by former students for the Chair of the Principal. ”

“ At the age of fifteen she began to teach school during the winter months, attending school herself in the summer. At eighteen she entered Holyoke seminary, but finding the advantages there inadequate for a thorough education, her parents removed, for her benefit, to Yellow Springs, Ohio, where she entered Antioch college, Horace Mann, one of the best educators of his day, being president. ”

“ Not only has the need for moral leadership been superbly met in this community, the desire for quality education for all has been fulfilled. Formal education in Holyoke had its beginnings in a humble, one-room schoolhouse in 1802. As the community grew, so, too, grew Holyoke's schools. Today, excellent public and parochial systems provide the young residents of Holyoke with a variety of opportunities for instruction. ”

“ Holyoke's residence in Salem, preceding the revolution.
Dr. Holyoke during his whole life, it is said, was never fifty miles distant from the spot where he was born. He was the first person to receive the degree of M.D. from Harvard College; was the first president of the Massachusetts Medical Society; and he made in the course of his life three hundred and twenty-four thousand professional visits. [Pg 32]
Antiquity of Nursery Rhymes.—Many of these productions have a very curious history, if it could only be traced. ”

“ Mary Lyon had broad and noble ideas concerning the necessity for the education of woman and the possible bless ings that would come from it to the world. One one occasion, when she was under the strain of great effort to obtain needed help for Mt. Holyoke Female School (the institution of which she was the founder is now known as Mt. Holyoke College) she wrote a letter to a leading minister, in the course of which she said: "Woman elevated by the Christian religion was designed by Providence as the educator of our race. ”

“ Bradford Academy, chartered in 1804, is the oldest incorporated institution in the country to which boys and girls were from the first admitted; but it closed its department for boys in 1836, three years after the foundation of 317 coeducational Oberlin, and in the very year when Mount Holyoke was opened by Mary Lyon, in the large hope of doing for young women what Harvard had been founded to do for young men just two hundred years before. Ipswich and Abbot Academies in Massachusetts had already been chartered to educate girls alone. ”

“ Many men as well as women have expressed their admiration of the college in a tangible way.
And from Vassar, Smith, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Barnard, Wells, Simmons, and Sweet Briar, contributions came pouring in unsolicited. Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Tufts, and others had already loaned equipment and material for the impoverished laboratories, and direct contributions to the fund came from the University of Idaho, the Musical Clubs of Dartmouth and the Institute of Technology ”

“ The poverty and intense prejudice of the people made her task a trying one, but her efforts were crowned with great success. Her work spread in the smaller places of the mountains, and the school which has been established there is a monument to her energy and fearless Christian faith. She returned to America in 1847, and was president of Mount Holyoke Seminary for a brief time, but her health failing, she died July 26, 1864, in her forty-eighth year. ”

“ She alternated teaching in a country school in summer with study in the village academy in winter, till, in the fall of 1854, she entered Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, in South Hadley, Mass. Though she remained only one year, reviewing branches already quite thoroughly mastered, she there first began to be interested in those theological investigations that have shaped her life. Questioning the doctrinal teaching made prominent in the seminary, she secured the strongest Universalist documents she could find and laid the foundations of a faith never since shaken. ”

“ Another million will soon be needed, properly to house our departments of Botany and Chemistry, and to provide a Student-Alumnae building, and sufficient dormitories to house on the campus the more than five hundred students now living in the village. We are facing a great crisis in the history of the College. The future of our Alma Mater is in our hands. Crippled by this loss, Wellesley cannot continue to hold in the future its place in the front rank of colleges, unless the response is generous and immediate. ”

“ In this happy condition of affairs, the alumnae trustees undoubtedly play a mediating part, for they understand the college from within as no clergyman, financier, philanthropist,—no graduate of a man's college—can hope to, be he never so enthusiastic and well-meaning in the cause of woman's education. But so long as the faculty are excluded from direct representation on the board, the situation will continue to be anomalous. For it is not too sweeping to assert that Wellesley's development and academic standing are due to the cooperative wisdom and devoted scholarship of her faculty. ”

“ The initiative on the part of the faculty has been exerted chiefly along academic lines, but in some instances it has necessitated important emendations of the statutes; and that the trustees were willing to alter the statutes on the request of the faculty would indicate the friendly confidence felt toward the innovators.
In the statutes of Wellesley College, as printed in 1885, we read that "The College was founded for the glory of God and the service of the Lord Jesus Christ, in and by the education and culture of women. ”

“ Like all American colleges, Wellesley makes heavy and constant demands on the mere pedagogic power of its teachers. Their days are pretty well filled with the classroom routine and the necessary and incessant social intercourse with the eager crowd of youth. It may be years before an American college for women can sustain and foster creative scholarship for its own sake, after the example of the European universities ”

“ The Chautauqua University has no purpose of swelling Chautauqua ranks at the expense of established resident institutions. It offers no allurement to turn young men or young women away from college. It seeks to foster the college spirit, to create a desire for intimate knowledge of the liberal arts. It would see college graduates numbered not by tens, but by hundreds. It holds high the banner of college education. ”

“ We have not all of a university when we have men and buildings, money, students, brains. Back of a university there lies its foundation-idea, that of academic control.
What is academic rule? It is rule over the pride of man. A college is a place whose chief power is to inculcate humility by the means of true learning; to establish intellectual honor and integrity by searching out the ways of God in nature, science, and philosophy, and in letters and in art.
It is the primary work of a university to make men humble. The Freshman is not teachable. The Sophomore is an intellectual upstart. ”

“ The then Chairman of the Council of the Yorkshire College, the late Dr. Heaton, was not wholly friendly to the idea of a new northern university, and ultimately he dissociated himself from his colleagues on this particular question. He was never able to persuade himself that another university was actually needed or was desirable. In his judgment the interests of higher education, so far at least as the creation of degree-granting bodies could serve them, were sufficiently assured in England by the existence of the universities of Oxford, Cambridge, and London. ”

“ But the Faculty themselves were certainly an assemblage of very able men. Making all the allowance for the point of view, and that I was then a youth looking at my elders who had become famous, and that I am now looking as an old man at young men, I still think there can be no comparison between the college administrators of fifty years ago and those of to-day. It was then the policy of the college to call into its service great men who had achieved eminent distinction in the world without. ”

“ Houghton nodded. "That's fair."
"The trouble is, people don't do that. They persist in butting into the college world, jerking out some sophomore celebration, and saying, 'What use is this silly thing in the real world?'"
"Well, aren't they right?"
"No. That's just the point. The college world is a mimic world—and your lifetime is just four years. The sophomore celebration is a practical thing there; perhaps it's teaching loyalty—that generally comes first. That's your college rolling-room. But the graduate—he's learned to do something well. ”

“ This was the theory of the middle-age university and the design of collegiate foundations in their origin. Time and circumstances have brought about a total change. The colleges no longer promote the researches of science, or direct professional study. Here and there college walls may shelter an occasional student, but not in larger proportions than may be found in private life. Elementary teaching of youths under twenty is now the only function performed by the university, and almost the only object of college endowments. ”

“ The students themselves are swift to recognize and rebuke, usually in the "Free Press" or the "Parliament of Fools", of the College News, any signs of intellectual indifference or laxity. Wellesley, like Harvard and other large colleges, has its uninspiring level stretches of mediocrity; but it has its little leaping hills, its soaring peaks as well. Every class has its band of devoted students for whom the things of the mind are supreme; every class has its scattering of youthful scholars to give distinction to the academic landscape. ”

“ Any intelligent person who turns the pages of the official calendar may easily discover that the standard of admission and the requirements for the degree of Bachelor of Arts place Wellesley in the first rank among American colleges, whether for men or for women. But every woman's college, besides conforming to the general standard, is making its own contribution to the higher education of women. ”

“ Her wide acquaintance with the policies of other colleges and with modern tendencies in education prompts her to constant enlargement and modification, while her accurate knowledge of Wellesley's conditions and her large patience are a check on the too exuberant spirit of innovation. With Miss Pendleton as president, the college is sure to advance with dignity and with safety. She will do better than 'build up' the college, for she will quicken and guide its growth from within. ”

“ Wellesley is one of the earliest of the colleges to place the fine arts and music on her list of electives counting for an academic degree.
During the year 1895-1896, the Academic Council reviewed its rules of procedure relating to the maintenance of scholarship throughout the course, with the result that, "In order to be recommended for the degree of B.A. a student must pass with credit in at least one half of her college work and in at least one half of the work of the senior year." ”

“ What the prospective lawyer really needs to broaden his horizon and prevent him from succumbing to the bondage of his shop, is letters, science, mathematics; what the future doctor needs is letters, art, history, and the unbiological sciences. This ought to be the function of the college. To continue along any other line is to destroy forever the Yale that has held such an enviable place in American life for over two centuries—to extinguish the light that has been a source of guidance and inspiration to its large and distinguished band of alumni. ”

“ In like fashion, the spirit of the university, the spirit of zeal and devotion, of beauty-loving and truth-fearing which is in Colorado College to-day will make the university an accomplished fact. Truth-fearing—there is no better phrase—truth-fearing is the spirit of the university.
There is no real difference between the American college and the university, and there will never be any. The lower achievement lead to the higher ambition. Many colleges are little, or weak, or lean or narrow universities ”