Chapter II: The Presidents and Their Achievement (1)

Wellesley's career differs in at least one obvious and important particular from the careers of her sister colleges, Smith, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr,--in the swift succession of her presidents during her formative years. Smith College, opening in the same year as Wellesley, 1875, remained under President Seelye's wise guidance for thirty-five years. Vassar, between 1886 and 1914, had but one president. Bryn Mawr, in 1914, still followed the lead of Miss Thomas, first dean and then president. In 1911, Wellesley's sixth president was inaugurated. Of the five who preceded President Pendleton, only Miss Hazard served more than six years, and even Miss Hazard's term of eleven years was broken by more than one long absence because of illness.

It is useless to deny that this lack of administrative continuity had its disadvantages, yet no one who watched the growth and development of Wellesley during her first forty years could fail to mark the genuine progression of her scholarly ideal. Despite an increasingly hampering lack of funds--poverty is not too strong a word--and the disconcerting breaks and changes in her presidential policy, she never took a backward step, and she never stood still. The Wellesley that Miss Freeman inherited was already straining at its leading strings and impatient of its boarding-school horizons; the Wellesley that Miss Shafer left was a college in every modern acceptation of the term, and its academic prestige has been confirmed and enhanced by each successive president.

Of these six women who were called to direct the affairs of Wellesley in her first half century, Miss Ada L. Howard seems to have been the least forceful; but her position was one of peculiar difficulty, and she apparently took pains to adjust herself with tact and dignity to conditions which her more spirited successors would have found unbearably galling. Professor George Herbert Palmer, in his biography of his wife, epitomizes the early situation when he says that Mr. Durant "had, it is true, appointed Miss Ada L. Howard president; but her duties as an executive officer were nominal rather than real; neither his disposition, her health, nor her previous training allowing her much power."

Miss Howard was a New Hampshire woman, the daughter of William Hawkins Howard and Adaline Cowden Howard. Three of her great grandfathers were officers in the War of the Revolution. Her father is said to have been a good scholar and an able teacher as well as a scientific agriculturist, and her mother was "a gentlewoman of sweetness, strength and high womanhood." When their daughter was born, the father and mother were living in Temple, a village of Southern New Hampshire not very far from Jaffrey. The little girl was taught by her father, and was later sent to the academy at New Ipswich, New Hampshire, to the high school at Lowell, and to Mt. Holyoke Seminary, where she was graduated. After leaving Mt. Holyoke, she taught at Oxford, Ohio, and she was at one time the principal of the Woman's Department of Knox College, Illinois. In the early '70's this was a career of some distinction, for a woman, and Mr. Durant was justified in thinking that he had found the suitable executive head for his college. We hear of his saying, "I have been four years looking for a president. She will be a target to be shot at, and for the present the position will be one of severe trials."

Miss Howard came to Wellesley in 1875, giving up a private school of her own, Ivy Hall, in Bridgeton, New Jersey, in order to become a college president. No far-seeing policies can be traced to her, however; she seems to have been content to press her somewhat narrow and rigid conception of discipline upon a more or less restive student body, and to follow Mr. Durant's lead in all matters pertaining to scholarship and academic expansion.

We can trace that expansion from year to year through this first administration. In 1877 the Board of Visitors was established, and eminent educators and clergymen were invited to visit the college at stated intervals and stimulate by their criticism the college routine. In 1878 the Students' Aid Society was founded to help the many young women who were in need of a college training, but who could not afford to pay their own way. Through the wise generosity of Mrs. Durant and a group of Boston women, the society was set upon its feet, and its long career of blessed usefulness was begun. This is only one of the many gifts which Wellesley owes to Mrs. Durant. As Professor Katharine Lee Bates has said in her charming sketch of Mrs. Durant in the Wellesley Legenda for 1894: "Her specific gifts to Wellesley it is impossible to completely enumerate. She has forgotten, and no one else ever knew. So long as Mr. Durant was living, husband and wife were one and inseparable in service and donation. But since his death, while it has been obvious that she spends herself unsparingly in college cares, adding many of his functions to her own, a continuous flow of benefits, almost unperceived, has come to Wellesley from her open hand." As long as her health permitted, she lavished "her very life in labor of hand and brain for Wellesley, even as her husband lavished his."

In 1878 the Teachers' Registry was also established, a method of registration by which those students who expected to teach might bring their names and qualifications before the schools of the country. But the most important academic events of this year, and those which reacted directly upon the intellectual life of the college, were the establishment of the Physics laboratory, under the careful supervision of Professor Whiting, and the endowment of the Library by Professor Eben N. Horsford of Cambridge. This endowment provided a fund for the purchase of new books and for various expenses of maintenance, and was only one of the many gifts which Wellesley was to receive from this generous benefactor. Another gift, of this year, was the pipe organ, presented by Mr. William H. Groves, for the College Hall Chapel. Later, when the new Memorial Chapel was built, this organ was removed to Billings Hall, the concert room of the Department of Music.

On June 24, 1879, Wellesley held her first Commencement exercises, with a graduating class of eighteen and an address by the Reverend Richard S. Storrs, D.D., on the "Influence of Woman in the Future."

In 1880, on May 27, the corner stone of Stone Hall was laid, the second building on the college campus. It was the gift of Mrs. Valeria G. Stone, and was intended, in the beginning, as a dormitory for the "teacher specials." Doctor William A. Willcox of Malden, a devoted trustee of Wellesley from 1878 to 1904, and a relative of Mrs. Stone, was influential in securing this gift for the college, and it was he who first turned the attention of Mr. and Mrs. Durant to the needs of the women who had already been engaged in teaching, but who wished to fit themselves for higher positions by advanced work in one or more particular directions. At first, there were a good many of them, and even as late as 1889 and 1890 there were a few still in evidence; but gradually, as the number of regular students increased, and accommodations became more limited, and as opportunities for college training multiplied, these "T. Specs." as they were irreverently dubbed by the undergraduates, disappeared, and Stone Hall has for many years been filled with students in regular standing.

On June 10, 1880, the corner stone of Music Hall was laid; the inscription in the stone reads: "The College of Music is dedicated to Almighty God with the hope that it will be used in his service." There are added the following passages from the Bible:

"Trust ye in the Lord forever: for in the Lord Jehovah is everlasting strength." Isaiah, 26: 4.

"Sing praises to God, sing praises:
Sing praises unto our King, sing praises.
For God is the King of all the earth." Psalms, 47: 6-7.

The building was given by the founders.

The year 1881 is marked by the closing, in June, of Wellesley's preparatory department, another intellectual advance. In June also, on the tenth, the corner stone of Simpson Cottage was laid. The building was the gift of Mr. Michael Simpson, and has been used since 1908 as the college hospital. In the autumn of 1881, Stone Hall and Waban Cottage--the latter another gift from the founders were opened for students.

On October 3, 1881, Mr. Durant died, and shortly afterwards Miss Howard resigned. After leaving Wellesley, she lived in Methuen, Massachusetts, and in Brooklyn, New York, where she died, March 3, 1907. Mrs. Marion Pelton Guild, of the class of '80, says of Miss Howard, in an article on Wellesley written for the New England Magazine, October, 1914, that "she was in the difficult position of the nominal captain, who is in fact only a lieutenant. Yet she held it with a true self-respect, honoring the fiery genius of her leader, if she could not always follow its more startling fights; and not hesitating to withstand him in his most positive plans, if her long practical experience suggested that it was necessary." From Mt. Holyoke, her Alma Mater, Miss Howard received, in the latter part of her life, the honorary degree of Doctor of Letters.

II.

Wellesley's second president, Alice E. Freeman, is, of all the six, the one most widely known. Her magnetic personality, her continued and successful efforts during her administration to bring Wellesley out of its obscurity and into the public eye, her extended activity in educational matters after her marriage, gave her a prominence throughout the country which was surpassed by very few women of her generation. And her husband's reverent and poetical interpretation of her character has secured for her reputation a literary permanence unusual to the woman of affairs who "wrote no books and published only half a dozen articles", and whose many public addresses were never written.

It is from Professor Palmer's "Life of Alice Freeman Palmer", published by the Houghton Mifflin Co., that the biographical material for the brief sketch following is derived.

Alice Elvira Freeman was born at Colesville, Broome County, New York, on February 21, 1855. She was a country child, a farmer's daughter as her mother was before her. James Warren Freeman, the father, was of Scottish blood. His mother was a Knox, and his maternal grandfather was James Knox of Washington's Life Guard. James Freeman was, as we should expect, an elder of the Presbyterian church. The mother, Elizabeth Josephine Higley, "had unusual executive ability and a strong disposition to improve social conditions around her. She interested herself in temperance, and in legislation for the better protection of women and children." Their little daughter Alice, the eldest of four children, taught herself to read when she was three years old, and we find her going to school at the age of four. When she was seven, her father, urged by his wife, decided to be a physician, and during his two years' absence at the Albany medical school, Mrs. Freeman supported him and the four little children. The incident helps us to understand the ambition and determination of the seventeen-year-old daughter when she declared in the face of her parents' opposition, "that she meant to have a college degree if it took her till she was fifty to get it. If her parents could help her, even partially, she would promise never to marry until she had herself put her brother through college and given to each of her sisters whatever education they might wish--a promise subsequently performed."

And the girl had her own ideas about the kind of college she meant to attend. It must be a real college. Mt. Holyoke she rejected because it was a young ladies' seminary, and Elmira and Vassar fell under the same suspicion, in her mind, although they were nominally colleges. She chose Michigan, the strongest of the coeducational colleges, and she entered only two years after its doors were opened to women.

She did not enter in triumph, however; the academy at Windsor, New York, where she had gone to school after her father became a physician, was good at supplying "general knowledge" but "poorly equipped for preparing pupils for college", and Doctor Freeman's daughter failed to pass her entrance examinations for Michigan University. President Angell tells the story sympathetically in "The Life", as follows:

"In 1872, when Alice Freeman presented herself at my office, accompanied by her father, to apply for admission to the university, she was a simple, modest girl of seventeen. She had pursued her studies in the little academy at Windsor. Her teacher regarded her as a child of much promise, precocious, possessed of a bright, alert mind, of great industry, of quick sympathies, and of an instinctive desire to be helpful to others. Her preparation for college had been meager, and both she and her father were doubtful of her ability to pass the required examinations. The doubts were not without foundation. The examiners, on inspecting her work, were inclined to decide that she ought to do more preparatory work before they could accept her. Meantime I had had not a little conversation with her and her father, and had been impressed with her high intelligence. At my request the examiners decided to allow her to enter on a trial of six weeks. I was confident she would demonstrate her capacity to go on with her class. I need hardly add that it was soon apparent to her instructors that my confidence was fully justified. She speedily gained and constantly held an excellent position as a scholar."

President Angell is of course using the term "scholar" in its undergraduate connotation for, as Professor Palmer has been careful to state, "In no field of scholarship was she eminent." Despite her eagerness for knowledge, her bent was for people rather than for books; for what we call the active and objective life, rather than for the life of thought. Wellesley has had her scholar presidents, but Miss Freeman was not one of them. This friendly, human temper showed itself early in her college days. To quote again from President Angell: "One of her most striking characteristics in college was her warm and demonstrative sympathy with her circle of friends.... Without assuming or striving for leadership, she could not but be to a certain degree a leader among these, some of whom have since attained positions only less conspicuous for usefulness than her own.... No girl of her time on withdrawing from college would have been more missed than she."

It is for this eagerness in friendship, this sympathetic and helpful interest in the lives of others that Mrs. Palmer is especially remembered at Wellesley. Her own college days made her quick to understand the struggles and ambitions of other girls who were hampered by inadequate preparation, or by poverty. Her husband tells us that, "When a girl had once been spoken to, however briefly, her face and name were fixed on a memory where each incident of her subsequent career found its place beside the original record." And he gives the following incident as told by a superintendent of education.

"Once after she had been speaking in my city, she asked me to stand beside her at a reception. As the Wellesley graduates came forward to greet her--there were about eighty of them--she said something to each which showed that she knew her. Some she called by their first names; others she asked about their work, their families, or whether they had succeeded in plans about which they had evidently consulted her. The looks of pleased surprise which flashed over the faces of those girls I cannot forget. They revealed to me something of Miss Freeman's rich and radiant life. For though she seemed unconscious of doing anything unusual, and for her I suppose it was usual, her own face reflected the happiness of the girls and showed a serene joy in creating that happiness."

Her husband, in his analysis of her character, has a remarkable passage concerning this very quality of disinterestedness. He says:

"Her moral nature was grounded in sympathy. Beginning early, the identification of herself with others grew into a constant habit, of unusual range and delicacy.... Most persons will agree that sympathy is the predominantly feminine virtue, and that she who lacks it cannot make its absence good by any collection of other worthy qualities. In a true woman sympathy directs all else. To find a virtue equally central in a man we must turn to truthfulness or courage. These also a woman should possess, as a man too should be sympathetic; but in her they take a subordinate place, subservient to omnipresent sympathy. Within these limits the ampler they are, the nobler the woman.

"I believe Mrs. Palmer had a full share of both these manly excellences, and practiced them in thoroughly feminine fashion. She was essentially true, hating humbug in all its disguises.... Her love of plainness and distaste for affectation were forms of veracity. But in narrative of hers one got much besides plain realities. These had their significance heightened by her eager emotion, and their picturesqueness by her happy artistry.... Of course the warmth of her sympathy cut off all inclination to falsehood for its usual selfish purpose. But against generous untruth she was not so well guarded. Kindness was the first thing.... Tact too, once become a habit, made adaptation to the mind addressed a constant concern. She had extraordinary skill in stuffing kindness with truth; and into a resisting mind could without irritation convey a larger bulk of unwelcome fact than any one I have known. But that insistence on colorless statement which in our time the needs of trade and science have made current among men, she did not feel. Lapses from exactitude which do not separate person from person she easily condoned."

Surely the manly virtues of truthfulness and courage could be no better exemplified than in the writing of this passage. Whether his readers, especially the women, will agree with Professor Palmer that, in woman, truthfulness and courage "take a subordinate place, subservient to omnipresent sympathy", is a question.

Between 1876 when she was graduated from Michigan, and 1879 when she went to Wellesley, Miss Freeman taught with marked success, first at a seminary in the town of Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, where she had charge of the Greek and Latin; and later as assistant principal of the high school at Saginaw in Northern Michigan. Here she was especially successful in keeping order among unruly pupils. The summer of 1877 she spent in Ann Arbor, studying for a higher degree, and although she never completed the thesis for this work, the university conferred upon her the degree of Ph.D. in 1882, the first year of her presidency at Wellesley.

In this same summer of 1877, when she was studying at Ann Arbor, she received her first invitation to teach at Wellesley. Mr. Durant offered her an instructorship in Mathematics, which she declined. In 1878 she was again invited, this time to teach Greek, but her sister Stella was dying, and Miss Freeman, who had now settled her entire family at Saginaw, would not leave them. In June, 1879, the sister died, and in July Miss Freeman became the head of the Department of History at Wellesley, at the age of twenty-four.

Mr. Durant's attention had first been drawn to her by her good friend President Angell, and he had evidently followed her career as a teacher with interest. There seems to have been no abatement in his approval after she went to Wellesley. We are told that they did not always agree, but this does not seem to have affected their mutual esteem. In her first year, Mr. Durant is said to have remarked to one of the trustees, "You see that little dark-eyed girl? She will be the next president of Wellesley." And before he died, he made his wishes definitely known to the board.

At a meeting of the trustees, on November 15, 1881, Miss Freeman was appointed vice president of the college and acting president for the year. She was then twenty-six years of age and the youngest professor in the college. In 1882 she became president.

During the next six years, Wellesley's growth was as normal as it was rapid. This is a period of internal organization which achieved its most important result in the evolution of the Academic Council. "In earlier days," we are told by Professor Palmer, "teachers of every rank met in the not very important faculty meetings, to discuss such details of government or instruction as were not already settled by Mr. Durant." But even then the faculty was built up out of departmental groups, that is, "all teachers dealing with a common subject were banded together under a head professor and constituted a single unit," and, as Mrs. Guild tells us, Miss Freeman "naturally fell to consulting the heads of departments as the abler and more responsible members of the faculty," instead of laying her plans before the whole faculty at its more or less cumbersome weekly meetings. From this inner circle of heads of departments the Academic Council was gradually evolved. It now includes the president, the dean, professors, associate professors (unless exempted by a special tenure of office), and such other officers of instruction and administration as may be given this responsibility by vote of the trustees.

Miss Freeman also "began the formation of standing committees of the faculty on important subjects, such as entrance examinations, graduate work, preparatory schools, etc."

This faculty, over which Miss Freeman presided, was a notable one, a body of women exhibiting in marked degree those qualities and virtues of the true pioneer: courage, patience, originality, resourcefulness, and vision. There were strong groups from Ann Arbor and Oberlin and Mt. Holyoke, and there was a fourth group of "pioneer scholars, not wholly college bred, but enriched with whatever amount of academic training they could wring or charm from a reluctant world, whom Wellesley will long honor and revere."

With the organization of the faculty came also the organization of the college work. Entrance examinations were made more severe. Greek had been first required for entrance in 1881. A certificate of admission was drawn up, stating exactly what the candidate had accomplished in preparation for college. Courses of study were standardized and simplified. In 1882, the methods of Bible study were reorganized, and instead of the daily classes, to which no serious study had been given, two hours a week of "examinable instruction" were substituted. In this year also the gymnasium was refitted under the supervision of Doctor D. A. Sargent of Harvard.

Miss Freeman's policy of establishing preparatory schools which should be "feeders" for Wellesley was of the greatest importance to the college at this time, as "in only a few high schools were the girls allowed to join classes which fitted boys for college." When Miss Freeman became president, Dana Hall was the only Wellesley preparatory school in existence; but in 1884, through her efforts, an important school was opened in Philadelphia, and before the end of her presidency, she had been instrumental in furthering the organization of fifteen other schools in different parts of the country, officered for the most part by Wellesley graduates.

In this same year the Christian Association was organized. Its history, bound up as it is with the student life, will be given more fully in a later chapter, but we must not forget that Miss Freeman gave the association its initial impulse and established its broad type.

In 1884 also, we find Wellesley petitioning before the committee on education at the State House in Boston, to extend its holdings from six hundred thousand dollars to five million dollars, and gaining the petition.

On June 22, 1885, the corner stone of the Decennial Cottage, afterwards called Norumbega, was laid. The building was given by the alumnae, aided by Professor Horsford, Mr. E. A. Goodenow and Mr. Elisha S. Converse of the Board of Trustees. Norumbega was for many years known as the President's House, for here Miss Freeman, Miss Shafer, and Mrs. Irvine lived. In the academic year 1901-02, when Miss Hazard built the house for herself and her successors, the president's modest suite in Norumbega was set free for other purposes.

In 1886, Norumbega was opened, and in June of that year, the Library Festival was held to celebrate Professor Horsford's many benefactions to the college. These included the endowment of the Library, an appropriation for scientific apparatus, and a system of pensions.

In a letter to the trustees, dated January 1, 1886, the donor explains that the annual appropriation for the library shall be for the salaries of the librarian and assistants, for books for the library, and for binding and repairs. That the appropriation for scientific apparatus shall go toward meeting the needs of the departments of Physics, Chemistry, Botany, and Biology. And that the System of Pensions shall include a Sabbatical Grant, and a "Salary Augment and Pension." By the Sabbatical Grant, the heads of certain departments are able to take a year of travel and residence abroad every seventh year on half salary. The donor stipulated, however, that "the offices contemplated in the grants and pensions must be held by ladies."

In his memorable address on this occasion, Professor Horsford outlines his ideal for the library which he generously endowed:

"But the uses of books at a seat of learning reach beyond the wants of the undergraduates. The faculty need supplies from the daily widening field of literature. They should have access to the periodical issues of contemporary research and criticism in the various branches of knowledge pertaining to their individual departments. In addition to these, the progressive culture of an established college demands a share in whatever adorns and ennobles scholarly life, and principally the opportunity to know something of the best of all the past,--the writers of choice and rare books. To meet this demand there will continue to grow the collections in specialties for bibliographical research, which starting like the suite of periodicals with the founder, have been nursed, as they will continue to be cherished, under the wise direction of the Library Council. Some of these will be gathered in concert, it may be hoped, with neighboring and venerable and hospitable institutions, that costly duplicates may be avoided; some will be exclusively our own.

"To these collections of specialties may come, as to a joint estate in the republic of letters, not alone the faculty of the college, but such other persons of culture engaged in literary labor as may not have found facilities for conducting their researches elsewhere, and to whom the trustees may extend invitation to avail themselves of the resources of our library."

These ideals of scholarship and hospitality the Wellesley College Library never forgets. Her Plimpton collection of Italian manuscripts is a treasure-house for students of the Italy of the Middle Ages and Renaissance; and her alumnae, as well as scholars from other colleges and other lands, are given every facility for study.

In 1887, two dormitories were added to the college: Freeman Cottage, the gift of Mrs. Durant, and the Eliot, the joint gift of Mrs. Durant and Mr. H. H. Hunnewell. Originally the Eliot had been used as a boarding-house for the young women working in a shoe factory at that time running in Wellesley village, but after Mrs. Durant had enlarged and refurnished it, students who wished to pay a part of their expenses by working their way through college were boarded there. Some years later it was again enlarged, and used as a village-house for freshmen.

In December, 1887, Miss Freeman resigned from Wellesley to marry Professor George Herbert Palmer of Harvard; but her interest in the college did not flag, and during her lifetime she continued to be a member of the Board of Trustees. From 1892 to 1895 she held the office of Dean of Women of the University of Chicago; and Radcliffe, Bradford Academy, and the International Institute for Girls, in Spain, can all claim a share in her fostering interest. From 1889 until the end of her life, she was a member of the Massachusetts Board of Education, having been appointed by Governor Ames and reappointed by Governor Greenhalge and Governor Crane.

In addition to the degree of Ph.D. received from Michigan in 1882, Miss Freeman received the honorary degree of Litt.D. from Columbia in 1887, and in 1895 the honorary degree of LL.D., from Union University.

What she meant to the women who were her comrades at Wellesley in those early days--the women who held up her hands--is expressed in an address by Professor Whiting at the memorial service held in the chapel in December, 1903:

"I think of her in her office, which was also her private parlor, with not even a skilled secretary at first, toiling with all the correspondence, seeing individual girls on academic and social matters, setting them right in cases of discipline, interviewing members of the faculty on necessary plans. The work was overwhelming and sometimes her one assistant would urge her, late in the evening, to nibble a bite from a tray which, to save time, had been sent in to her room at the dinner hour, only to remain untouched.... No wonder that professors often left their lectures to be written in the wee small hours, to help in uncongenial administrative work, which was not in the scope of their recognized duties."

The pathos of her death in Paris, in December, 1902, came as a shock to hundreds of people whose lives had been brightened by her eager kindliness; and her memory will always be especially cherished by the college to which she gave her youth. The beautiful memorial in the college chapel will speak to generations of Wellesley girls of this lovable and ardent pioneer.

III.

Wellesley's debt to her third president, Helen A. Shafer, is nowhere better defined than in the words of a distinguished alumna, Sophonisba P. Breckenridge, writing on Miss Shafer's administration, in the Wellesley College News of November 2, 1901. Miss Breckenridge says:

It is said that in a great city on the shore of a western
lake the discovery was made one day that the surface of the
water had gradually risen and that stately buildings on the
lake front designed for the lower level had been found both
misplaced and inadequate to the pressure of the high level.
They were fair without, well proportioned and inviting; but
they were unsteady and their collapse was feared. To take
them down seemed a great loss: to leave them standing as
they were was to expose to certain perils those who came and
went within them. They proved to be the great opportunity of
the engineer. He first, without interrupting their use, or
disturbing those who worked within, made them safe and sure
and steady, able to meet the increased pressure of the higher
level, and then, likewise without interfering with the day's
work of any man, by skillful hidden work, adapted them to
the new conditions by raising their level in corresponding
measure. The story told of that engineer's great achievement
in the mechanical world has always seemed applicable to the
service rendered by Miss Shafer to the intellectual structure
of Wellesley.

Under the devoted and watchful supervision of the founders,
and under the brilliant direction of Miss Freeman, brave plans
had been drawn, honest foundations laid and stately walls
erected. The level from which the measurements were taken
was no low level. It was the level of the standard of
scholarship for women as it was seen by those who designed
the whole beautiful structure. To its spacious shelter were
tempted women who had to do with scholarly pursuits and girls
who would be fitted for a life upon that plane. But during
those first years that level itself was rising, and by its
rising the very structure was threatened with instability if
not collapse. And then she came. Much of the work of her
short and unfinished administration was quietly done; making
safe unsafe places, bringing stability where instability was
shown, requires hidden, delicate, sure labor and absorbed
attention. That labor and that attention she gave. It required
exact knowledge of the danger, exact fitting of the brace to
the rift. That she accomplished until the structure was again
fit. And then, by fine mechanical devices, well adapted to
their uses, patiently but boldly used, she undertook to raise
the level of the whole, that under the new claims upon women
Wellesley might have as commanding a position as it had
assumed under the earlier circumstances. It was a very
definite undertaking to which she put her hand, which she was
not allowed to complete. So clearly was it outlined in her
mind, so definitely planned, that in the autumn of 1893, she
thought if she were allowed four years more she would feel
that her task was done and be justified in asking to surrender
to other hands the leadership. After the time at which this
estimate was made, she was allowed three months, and the hands
were stilled. But the hands had been so sure, the work so
skillful, the plans so intelligent and the purpose so wise
that the essence of the task was accomplished. The peril of
collapse had been averted and the level of the whole had been
forever raised. The time allowed was five short years, of
which one was wholly claimed by the demands of the frail body;
the situation presented many difficulties. The service, too,
was in many respects of the kind whose glory is in its
inconspicuousness and obscure character, a structure that
would stand when builders were gone, a device that would
serve its end when its inventor was no more.--These are her
contribution. And because that contribution was so well made,
it has been ever since taken for granted. Her administration
is little known and this is as she would have it--since it
means that the extent to which her services were needed is
likewise little realized. But to those who do know and who do
realize, it is a glorious memory and a glorious aspiration.

Rare delicacy of perception, keen sympathy, exquisite honesty,
scholarly attainment of a very high order, humility of that
kind which enables one to sit without mortification among the
lowly, without self-consciousness among the great--these are
some of the gifts which enabled her to do just the work she
did, at the time when just that contribution to the permanence
and dignity of Wellesley was so essential.

Miss Freeman's work we may characterize as, in its nature, extensive. Miss Shafer's was intensive. The scholar and the administrator were united in her personality, but the scholar led. The crowning achievement of her administration was what was then called "the new curriculum."

In the college calendars from 1876 to 1879, we find as many as seven courses of study outlined. There was a General Course for which the degree of B.A. was granted, with summa cum laude for special distinction in scholarship. There were the courses for Honors, in Classics, Mathematics, Modern Languages, and Science; and students doing suitable work in them could be recommended for the degree. These elective courses made a good showing on paper; but it seems to have been possible to complete them by a minimum of study. There were also courses in Music and Art, extending over a period of five years instead of the ordinary four allotted to the General Course. Under Miss Freeman, the courses for Honors disappeared, and instead of the General Course there were substituted the Classical Course, with Greek as an entrance requirement and the degree of B.A. as its goal; and the Scientific Course, in which knowledge of French or German was substituted for Greek at entrance, and Mathematics was required through the sophomore year. The student who completed this course received the degree of B.S.

The "new curriculum" substituted for the two courses, Classical and Scientific, hitherto offered, a single course leading to the degree of B.A. As Miss Shafer explains in her report to the trustees for the year 1892-1893: "Thus we cease to confer the B.S. for a course not essentially scientific, and incapable of becoming scientific under existing circumstances, and we offer a course broad and strong, containing, as we believe, all the elements, educational and disciplinary, which should pertain to a course in liberal arts."

Further modifications of the elective system were introduced in a later administration, but the "new curriculum" continues to be the basis of Wellesley's academic instruction.

Time and labor were required to bring about these readjustments. The requirements for admission had to be altered to correspond with the new system, and the Academic Council spent three years in perfecting the curriculum in its new form.

Miss Shafer's own department, Mathematics, had already been brought up to a very high standard, and at one time the requirements for admission to Wellesley were higher in Mathematics than those for Harvard. Under Miss Shafer also, the work in English Composition was placed on a new basis; elective courses were offered to seniors and juniors in the Bible Department; a course in Pedagogy, begun toward the end of Miss Freeman's residency, was encouraged and increased; the laboratory of Physiological Psychology, the first in a woman's college and one of the earliest in any college, was opened in 1891 with Professor Calkins at its head. In all, sixty-seven new courses were opened to the students in these five years. The Academic Council, besides revising the undergraduate curriculum, also revised its rules governing the work of candidates for the Master's degree.

But the "new curriculum" is not the only achievement for which Wellesley honors Miss Shafer. In June, 1892, she recommended to the trustees that the alumnae be represented upon the board, and the recommendation was accepted and acted upon by the trustees. In 1914, about one fifth of the trustees were alumnae.

Professor Burrell, Miss Shafer's student, and later her colleague in the Department of Mathematics, says:

"From the first she felt a genuine interest in all sides of the social life of the students, sympathized with their ambitions and understood the bearing of them on the development of the right spirit in the college." And the members of the Greek letter societies bear her in especial remembrance, for it was she who aided in the reestablishing in 1889 of the societies Phi Sigma and Zeta Alpha, which had been suppressed in 1880, under Miss Howard. In 1889 also the Art Society, later known as Tau Zeta Epsilon, was founded; in 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into being, and 1892 saw the beginnings of Alpha Kappa Chi, the classical society. Miss Shafer also approved and fostered the department clubs which began to be formed at this time. And to her wise and sympathetic assistance we owe the beginnings of the college periodicals,--the old Courant, of 1888, the Prelude, which began in 1889, and the first senior annual, the Legenda of 1889.

The old boarding-school type of discipline which had flourished under Miss Howard, and lingered fitfully under Miss Freeman, gave place in Miss Shafer's day to a system of cuts and excuses which although very far from the self-government of the present day, still fostered and respected the dignity of the students. At the beginning of the academic year 1890-1891, attendance at prayers in chapel on Sunday evening and Monday morning was made optional. In this year also, seniors were given "with necessary restrictions, the privilege of leaving college, or the town, at their own discretion, whenever such absence did not take them from their college duties." On September 12, 1893, the seniors began to wear the cap and gown throughout the year.

Other notable events of these five years were the opening of the Faculty Parlor on Monday, September 24, 1888, another of the gifts of Professor Horsford, its gold and garlands now vanished never to return; the dedication of the Farnsworth Art Building on October 3, 1889, the gift of Mr. Isaac D. Farnsworth, a friend of Mr. Durant; the presentation in this same year, by Mr. Stetson, of the Amos W. Stetson collection of paintings; the opening, also in 1889, of Wood Cottage, a dormitory built by Mrs. Caroline A. Wood; the gift of a boathouse from the students, in 1893; and on Saturday, January 28, 1893, the opening of the college post office. We learn, through the president's report for 1892-1893, that during this year four professors and one instructor were called to fill professorships in other colleges and universities, with double the salary which they were then receiving, but all preferred to remain at Wellesley.

This custom of printing an annual report to the trustees may also be said to have been inaugurated by Miss Shafer. It is true that Miss Freeman had printed one such report at the close of her first year, but not again. Miss Shafer's clear and dignified presentations of events and conditions are models of their kind; they set the standard which her successors have followed.

Of Miss Shafer's early preparation for her work we have but few details. She was born in Newark, New Jersey, on September 23, 1839, and her father was a clergyman of the Congregational church, of mingled Scotch and German descent. Her parents moved out to Oberlin when she was still a young girl, and she entered the college and was graduated in 1863. The Reverend Frederick D. Allen of Boston, who was a classmate of Miss Shafer's, tells us that there were two courses at Oberlin in that day, the regular college course and a parallel, four years' course for young women. It seems that women were also admitted to the college course, but only a few availed themselves of the privilege, and Miss Shafer was not one of these. But Mr. Allen remembers her as "an excellent student, certainly the best among the women of her class."

After graduating from Oberlin, she taught two years in New Jersey, and then in the Olive Street High School in St. Louis for ten years, "laying the foundation of her distinguished reputation as a teacher of higher mathematics." Doctor William T. Harris, then superintendent of public schools in St. Louis, and afterwards United States Commissioner of Education, commended her very highly; and her old students at Wellesley witness with enthusiasm to her remarkable powers as a teacher. President Pendleton, who was one of those old students, says:

"Doubtless there was no one of these who did not receive the news of her appointment as president with something of regret. No one probably doubted the wisdom of the choice, but all were unwilling that the inspiration of Miss Shafer's teaching should be lost to the future Wellesley students. Her record as president leaves unquestioned her power in administrative work, yet all her students, I believe, would say that Miss Shafer was preeminently a teacher.

"It was my privilege to be one of a class of ten or more students who, during the last two years of their college life (1884-1886) elected Miss Shafer's course in Mathematics. It is difficult to give adequate expression to the impression which Miss Shafer made as a teacher. There was a friendly graciousness in her manner of meeting a class which established at once a feeling of sympathy between student and teacher.... She taught us to aim at clearness of thought and elegance of method; in short, to attempt to give to our work a certain finish which belongs only to the scholar.... I believe that it has often been the experience of a Wellesley girl, that once on her feet in Miss Shafer's classroom, she has surprised herself by treating a subject more clearly than she would have thought possible before the recitation. The explanation of this, I think, lay in the fact that Miss Shafer inspired her students with her own confidence in their intellectual powers."

When we realize that during the last ten years of her life she was fighting tuberculosis, and in a state of health which, for the ordinary woman, would have justified an invalid existence, we appreciate more fully her indomitable will and selflessness. During the winter of 1890-1891, she was obliged to spend some months in Thomasville, Georgia, and in her absence the duties of her office devolved upon Professor Frances E. Lord, the head of the Department of Latin, whose sympathetic understanding of Miss Shafer's ideals enabled her to carry through the difficult year with signal success. Miss Shafer rallied in the mild climate, and probably her life would have been prolonged if she had chosen to retire from the college; but her whole heart was in her work, and undoubtedly if she had known that her coming back to Wellesley meant only two more years of life on earth, she would still have chosen to return.

Miss Shafer had no surface qualities, although her friends knew well the keen sense of humor which hid beneath that grave and rather awkward exterior. But when the alumnae who knew her speak of her, the words that rise to their lips are justice, integrity, sympathy. She was an honorary member of the class of 1891, and on December 8, 1902, her portrait, painted by Kenyon Cox, was presented to the college by the Alumnae Association.

Miss Shafer's academic degrees were from Oberlin, the M.A. in 1877 and the LL.D. in 1893.

Mrs. Caroline Williamson Montgomery (Wellesley, '89), in a memorial sketch written for the '94 Legenda says: "I have yet to find the Wellesley student who could not and would not say, 'I can always feel sure of the fairness of Miss Shafer's decision.' Again and again have Wellesley students said, 'She treats us like women, and knows that we are reasoning beings.' Often she has said, 'I feel that one of Wellesley's strongest points is in her alumnae.' And once more, because of this confidence, the alumnae, as when students, were spurred to do their best, were filled with loyalty for their alma mater.... If I should try to formulate an expression of that life in brief, I should say that in her relation to the students there was perfect justness; as regards her own position, a passion for duty; as regards her character, simplicity, sincerity, and selflessness."

For more than sixteen years, from 1877, when she came to the college as head of the Department of Mathematics, to January 20, 1894, when she died, its president, she served Wellesley with all her strength, and the college remains forever indebted to her high standards and wise leadership.

IV.

In choosing Mrs. Irvine to succeed Miss Shafer as president of Wellesley, the trustees abandoned the policy which had governed their earlier choices. Miss Freeman and Miss Shafer had been connected with the college almost from the beginning. They had known its problems only from the inside. Mrs. Irvine was, by comparison, a newcomer; she had entered the Department of Greek as junior professor in 1890. But almost at once her unusual personality made its impression, and in the four years preceding her election to the presidency, she had arisen, as it were in spite of herself, to a position of power both in the classroom and in the Academic Council. As an outsider, her criticism, both constructive and destructive, was peculiarly stimulating and valuable; and even those who resented her intrusion could not but recognize the noble disinterestedness of her ideal for Wellesley.

The trustees were quick to perceive the value to the college of this unusual combination of devotion and clearsightedness, detachment and loving service. They also realized that the junior professor of Greek was especially well fitted to complete and perfect the curriculum which Miss Shafer had so ably inaugurated. For Mrs. Irvine was before all else a scholar, with a scholar's passion for rectitude and high excellence in intellectual standards.

Julia Josephine (Thomas) Irvine, the daughter of Owen Thomas and Mary Frame (Myers) Thomas, was born at Salem, Ohio, November 9, 1848. Her grandparents, strong abolitionists, are said to have moved to the middle west from the south because they became unwilling to live in a slave state. Mrs. Irvine's mother was the first woman physician west of the Alleghenies, and her mother's sister also studied medicine. Mrs. Irvine's student life began at Antioch College, Ohio, but later she entered Cornell University, receiving her bachelor's degree in 1875. In the same rear she was married to Charles James Irvine. In 1876, Cornell gave her the degree of Master of Arts. After her husband's death in 1886, Mrs. Irvine entered upon her career as a teacher, and in 1890 came to Wellesley, where her success in the classroom was immediate. Students of those days will never forget the vitality of her teaching, the enthusiasm for study which pervaded her classes. Wellesley has had her share of inspiring teachers, and among these Mrs. Irvine was undoubtedly one of the most brilliant.

The new president assumed her office reluctantly, and with the understanding that she should be allowed to retire after a brief term of years, when "the exigencies which suggested her appointment had ceased to exist." She knew the college, and she knew herself. With certain aspects of the Wellesley life she could never be entirely in accord. She was a Hicksite Quaker. The Wellesley of the decade 1890-1900 had moved a long way from the evangelical revivalism which had been Mr. Durant's idea of religion, but it was not until 1912 that the Quaker students first began to hold their weekly meetings in the Observatory. About this time also, through the kind offices of the Wellesley College Christian Association, a list of the Roman Catholic students then in college was given to the Roman Catholic parish priest. That the trustees in 1895 were willing to trust the leadership of the college to a woman whose religious convictions differed so widely from those of the founder indicates that even then Wellesley was beginning to outgrow her religious provincialism, and to recognize that a wise tolerance is not incompatible with steadfast Christian witness.

The religious services which Mrs. Irvine, in her official capacity, conducted for the college were impressive by their simplicity and distinction. An alumna of 1897 writes: "That commanding figure behind the reading-desk of the old chapel in College Hall made every one, in those days, rejoice when she was to lead the morning service." But the trustees, anxious to set her free for the academic side of her work, which now demanded the whole of her time, appointed a dean to relieve her of such other duties as she desired to delegate to another. This action was made possible by amendment of the statutes, adopted November 1, 1894, and in 1895, Miss Margaret E. Stratton, professor of the Department of Rhetoric, as it was then called, was appointed the first dean of the college.

The trustees did not define the precise nature of the relation between the president and the dean, but left these officers to make such division of work as should seem to them best, and we read in Mrs. Irvine's report for 1895 that, "For the present the Dean remains in charge of all that relates to the public devotional exercises of the college, and is chairman of the committee in charge of stated religious services. She is the authority referred to in all cases of ordinary discipline, and is the chairman of the committee which includes heads of houses and permission officers, all these officers are directly responsible to her."

Regarded from an intellectual and academic point of view, the administrations of Miss Shafer and Mrs. Irvine are a unit. Mrs. Irvine developed and perfected the policy which Miss Shafer had initiated and outlined. By 1895, all students were working under the new curriculum, and in the succeeding years the details of readjustment were finally completed. To carry out the necessary changes in the courses of study, certain other changes were also necessary; methods of teaching which were advanced for the '70's and '80's had been superseded in the '90's, and must be modified or abandoned for Wellesley's best good. To all that was involved in this ungrateful task, Mrs. Irvine addressed herself with a courage and determination not fully appreciated at the time. She had not Mrs. Palmer's skill in conveying unwelcome fact into a resisting mind without irritation; neither had she Miss Shafer's self-effacing, sympathetic patience. Her handling of situations and individuals was what we are accustomed to call masculine; it had, as the French say, the defects of its qualities; but the general result was tonic, and Wellesley's gratitude to this firm and far-seeing administrator increases with the passing of years.