Wellington College

“ The newcomers to Wellington, some timid, some brave, but all expectantly happy, were then borne away to the mysteries of college initiation--to the great world of advanced education. No hazing here, just the good-natured pranks dear to the heart of every college girl, and significant in the good fellowship established at the very outset of the broader school life. Came another shout:
"Get together, all together, keep together--wow! ”

“ The Duke of Wellington took a lively interest in this movement, and King George IV.'s patronage gave the new institution the name of "King's College". There seemed every reason to expect that the foundation would be on a munificent scale, when Wellington's acceptance of catholic emancipation offended many of the subscribers so deeply that they immediately withdrew from the undertaking, and the college was in consequence left almost entirely without endowment. ”

“ Edwin Green to let them confer with her on a most important matter.
The college authorities had announced that the H. C. of L. had affected Wellington just as it had every person and every institution, and students’ board would have to be raised for the ensuing year. This came as a blow to the majority of girls. Going to college is an expensive matter at best, and while there are many rich girls gathered in those institutions, the majority come from homes of moderate incomes and many from actual [273] poverty. ”

“ At the last meeting of the Governors of Wellington College, Lord Derby intimated that it was his intention to devote the profits of his justly celebrated translation of 'Homer' to the production of a prize to be given annually as a reward to the foundationer who within the year of his leaving the college should conduct himself to the entire approbation of the Head Master—be considered, in fact, the most industrious and well-conducted boy or young man in the school. ”

“ The same impulse which has put new life into the endowed grammar-schools throughout England has worked even more remarkably in another direction. The Victorian age bids fair to rival the Elizabethan in the number and importance of the new schools which it has founded and will hand on to the coming generation. Marlborough, Haileybury, Uppingham, Rossall, Clifton, Cheltenham, Radley, Malvern, and Wellington College, are nine schools which have taken their place in the first rank. ”

“ An authoritative account of the life of the college girl as it is lived to-day.
JANE ALLEN OF THE SUB TEAM
When Jane Allen left her beautiful Western home in Montana, sorely against her will, to go East, there to become a freshman at Wellington College, she was sure that she could never learn to endure the restrictions of college life. But she did.
JANE ALLEN: RIGHT GUARD
Jane Allen becomes a sophomore at Wellington College, but she has to face a severe trial that requires all her courage and character. The result is a triumph for being faithful to an ideal. ”

“ Molly Brown's Junior Days
Financial stumbling blocks are not the only thing that hinder the ease and increase the strength of college girls. Their troubles and their triumphs are their own, often peculiar to their environment. How Wellington students meet the experiences outside the class-rooms is worth the doing, the telling and the reading. ”

“ Now, a general seeks for an aide who can work twenty-three hours out of twenty-four, and possessed of all the knowledge that the Staff College can bestow. It is pleasant to note that many clever aspirants can be found, and that is the reason for the success of our arms to-day. If Wellington had had men of this type, he, like Hannibal and Napoleon, might also have conquered the Alps. But Wellington had to deal with aides who were simply British gentlemen with a passion for fox-hunting and a primitive thirst for blood. ”

“ She then told the story of the grateful man who had established the scholarship at Exmoor for the four years of the academic course and expatiated on his opinion of Southern youths. She lauded the college as having turned out such good men. Gradually she got to the subject of Louis and how close Wellington was to Exmoor, and before the old man knew what he was doing he had consented to Louis' accepting the scholarship. ”

“ The school system is administered by an educational department under a minister, assisted by education boards and school committees. The University of New Zealand is solely an examining body, awarding scholarships to be held by students at affiliated colleges. These are Otago University at Dunedin, with 35 professors; Canterbury College at Christchurch, with 18 professors; Auckland University College, with 14 professors; and Victoria College, Wellington, with nine professors, including lectures at each. All are endowed with land, and have over 1,500 students in attendance. ”

“ The college is to be self-supporting, unsectarian, and non-political. The fees are settled on a scale so low as to make the trial interesting as an experiment—and the lectures are to be open to ladies: a library and reading-room are to form parts of the establishment.
The sanctum of the Duke of Wellington at Walmer Castle is described as a room of but ordinary size, destitute of ornament, and with but scanty furniture, bearing very much the appearance of the apartment of a petty officer in a garrison. ”

“ The upper-class girls won't arrive until to-night or early in the morning. You know to-morrow is registration day and classes won't meet until Friday and Saturday. Now look straight ahead of you up the hill and you will get your first view of the campus. Let me tell you some of the buildings even if you don't remember them all. That tower is the chapel; the trees hide the building itself, but we shall see it better as we climb the hill. The white building is the new library, not quite finished as yet; to the right is East, next to that College Hall; opposite is Wellington ”

“ Still, when one stops to think about quite a number of girls at Wellington who are straining every nerve to put themselves through college, it seems a little bit selfish to spend so much on one's own pleasures. ”

“ As Wellington gave credit for the victory of Waterloo to the ‘playing-fields of Eton’, so England gives credit for innumerable triumphs, military, civil, and political, for achievements, physical, intellectual, and moral, to the playing-fields and the river, the lecture-rooms and the firesides of Oxford. The University boasts that it trains men to live lives both of achievement and of enjoyment, to meet exigencies and emergencies as they arise—to be not only men but gentlemen. Oxford and Cambridge degrees are accepted in England as educational hall-marks. ”

“ 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. ”

“ But, nevertheless, the noble viscount could not help admitting that the old universities of Oxford and Cambridge possess the merit of having established in England an excellent system of education, which is, in point of fact, the envy and admiration of the world. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Miss Pendleton unites a detailed and thorough knowledge of the history, the specific excellences, and the definite needs of Wellesley College, with openness of mind, breadth of outlook and the endowment for constructive leadership. No college procedure seems to her to be justified by precedent merely; no curriculum or legislation is, in her view, too sacred to be subject to revision. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 two women enjoyed these occasional chats about Wellington students. They were accustomed to regard most of the classes as units rather than the members as individuals. Sometimes it was a colorless, uninteresting class with no special traits worthy of admiration. Sometimes it was a snobbish, purse-proud class, as in the case of the present juniors. And again, as with last year's seniors, it was a class of sterling qualities made up of big girls with fine [36] minds. Seldom did a class contain more than one or two brilliant members, often not one. ”

“ 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." ”

“ No wood near Athens was ever so vision-haunted as Wellesley with the dancing spirits of past Tree Days.
On that day in early June the whole college turns itself into a pageant of spring. From the long hillside above which College Hall once towered, the faculty and the alumnae watch their younger sisters march in slow processional triumph around and about the wide green campus. Like a moving flower garden the procession winds upon itself; hundreds and hundreds of seniors and juniors and sophomores and freshmen,—more than fourteen hundred of them in 1914. ”

“ The first shovelful of earth was turned for Wellesley College the day before I was born, and when I was ready to enter as a student, only eleven classes had been graduated. Yet to me, coming as I did, from the embryonic, frontier college, with its single building in a waste of cactus and sagebrush, Wellesley, with its many dignified buildings set beside Lake Waban in a campus of sweeping lawns and stately trees, seemed an institution not only honorable, but ancient. ”

“ As Jane and Judith had predicted early in the term, sports had reached the acme of popularity at Wellington, and so well was the spirit and team work developed, that the usual small talk, and smaller squabbles were almost entirely obliterated, from the school curriculum--that furnished by the students, and not announced in the official prospectus. ”

“ We are content that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology should differ in scope from Harvard University; yet some of us, college graduates even, seem to have an uneasy feeling that Wellesley and Bryn Mawr may not be ministering adequately to life, because they do not add to their curricular activities the varied aims of an Agricultural College, a Business College, a School of Philanthropy, and a Cooking School, with required courses on the modifying of milk for infants. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Wellesley is not a college. The buildings are beautiful, perfect almost; the rooms and their appointments delightful, most of the professors are all that could be desired, some of them are very fine indeed in their several departments, but all these delightful things are not the things that make a college.... ”

“ The announcement of her election to the presidency was made to the college on June 9, 1911, by the president of the Board of Trustees, and the joy with which it was received by faculty, alumna, and students was as outspoken as it was genuine. And at her inauguration, many who listened to her clear and simple exposition of her conception of the function of a college must have rejoiced anew to feel that Wellesley's ideals of scholarship were committed to so safe and wise a guardian. ”

“ 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. ”