An Experiment in Faith: Radcliffe College

‘The Annex’ which this poem celebrates was an institution wherein certain courses of study in Harvard College were repeated by Harvard teachers for qualified girls and women. Its full title was ‘ The Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women by Professors and Other Instructors of Harvard College,’ but it needed, as Beatrice said to Don Pedro, ’another for workingdays’: hence ‘the Annex.’ The Harvard University Catalogue, announcing a prize open alike to Harvard boys and Annex girls, maintained its dignity by calling the girls ‘students pursuing courses of instruction in Cambridge under the direction of the Society for the Collegiate Instruction of Women.’ Expanded and recast in 1893-94, the Annex became Radcliffe College, the women’s Harvard. In June 1929 it will celebrate its fiftieth anniversary.

Now — when collegiate instruction of women is an indubitable fact — we forget that fifty years ago it was still regarded by the world in general as an innovating theory. Now — with it as with the suffrage — the question is no longer ‘Shall they have it?' but ‘ What do they do with it?’ For they not only have it; they have it all over. They have it with men and without them; in sequestered places and in metropolitan centres; in state institutions and in privately conducted institutions; in men’s studies taught by men, or by men and women, or by women only, and in such feminine accomplishments as kindergarten and cooking. Fifty years ago, when it was still looked at askance as an eccentric novelty, a handful of people in Cambridge thought the time ripe for a bold experiment. With financial resources glaringly insignificant, with no assurance of support for more than a single year, they undertook, by private arrangement with certain Harvard teachers, to make available for women certain Harvard courses of instruction. They could offer few courses and no degree; they could pay their teachers little; they had no buildings, scarcely any books, no recognizable expectations. They appeared to be laying a foundation in a swamp, or even in a quicksand; but they were upheld by the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. In fifty years, gradually, steadily, miraculously, with no convulsion of Nature, the quicksand has hardened into a rock.

An Athenian orator boasts that his nation differs from others in the purity of its origin, since it is autochthonous, sprung from the very soil. Radcliffe was born of no man’s or woman’s ambition and wealth, but rather of something in the air, in the spirit of the time and of the region whence came our oldest university.

An air castle the Annex must have seemed to the conservatism in which the region abounds. Whose air castle has been a matter of dispute. The late Agnes Irwin, first Dean of Radcliffe College, declared that she had known at least eight founders. I have always believed that the dreamers of the dream which waked the people of Cambridge were Arthur Gilman and Stella Scott Gilman, his wife. Arthur Gilman was not a Harvard man till years after, when he received from Harvard an honorary degree of A.M. as ‘purveyor of sound education to girls and women.’ He was the proprietor of a school for girls, a man of literary interests, doing literary work, living in Harvard society, with ample opportunity for observation of the University in its relation to the public.

The unconscious stimulus of the Gilmans’ dream was a normal, vigorous, and capable girl who, a year before the Annex was founded, had appeared in Cambridge and had surprised three Harvard professors into accepting her as a private pupil. Almost before they knew it Professors Goodwin, Child, and J. B. Greenough had agreed to teach her in Greek, English, and Latin, respectively. She surprised them again by her scholarship. She knew what she wanted, deserved it, got it, and used it well (in later life she was Professor Abby Leach of Vassar College).

Why should not these three gentlemen, and others, teach women by repeating for them selected courses hitherto offered in Harvard College only? Thus women would gain some small share of the University’s resources, without a revolution in its principles and charter.

Clearly such extension demanded, in both courtesy and policy, the good will and the spiritual support of President Eliot. Without these the Annex could not have come into being; without their constancy it would soon have come to an end. President Eliot disappointed, and possibly enraged, those women who demanded admission to Harvard as a right, and who, rather than compromise, would bombard; he did not please them when he said that, though women had shown in scholarship their ability to do what men could do, we did ‘not yet know at what sacrifice’; but, from the very first, he was a rock of dependence in the strength and the integrity of his good will. He was not the founder of the new institution—not the founder, but the foundation.

Nor could the Annex have existed without the cordial help of teachers willing, for small pay, to duplicate parts of their college work, nor without the active approval of people whose names and personal quality meant much in Cambridge — Mrs. Louis Agassiz, for example, and Miss Alice Longfellow. At a time when the collegiate instruction of women was unfashionable, these women, who had not known it themselves and who might be regarded as evidence that it is not needed, threw into the scale with it their energy, their culture, and their unquestioned social position. They opened their houses to the eagerly studious girls, giving time and strength to the problems which the new venture constantly presented, embodying the spirit which animated it, stirred by the triumphant optimism of pioneers.

Pioneers they were, in spite of all that America had already done for the education of women: they were breaking new ground with new implements. Pioneers, also, in their lack of money. Except Tuskegee, which opened in a specially cleaned henhouse,¹ Radcliffe is the best illustration that I know of the relatively small part played by physical equipment in an institution of learning. In the little upper room of a little private house, a silver-tongued philosopher, ‘glorious old Palmer’ (as William James has called him), held his classes spellbound. A great teacher ‘makes one little room an everywhere.’

For obvious reasons nearly all the original students were ‘Specials.’ Yet, though the Annex had no right to give degrees, and could promise only certificates that certain courses completed in it were equivalent to corresponding courses in Harvard University, though its offering of courses was closely limited, though it could see its way for one year only, the opening of that year brought three students who in due time did work which in quantity and quality met the requirements of a Harvard A.B. and which years afterward, when Radcliffe was established, gave them the degree from Radcliffe.

Thus with no manifest material foundation, living from hand to mouth (chiefly on faith, with a few tuition fees thrown in), the Annex struggled along till, like a squatter, it achieved a sort of title by merely existing where it was. Some persons have complained that repetition of a course saps a professor’s strength without promoting his intellectual growth. Others have answered that few professors can support their families on their salaries; that few can earn extra money more readily than by the use of material already prepared; that the change of sex in the audience offsets to some extent the monotony of repetition, and that, even if all this

were not true, Harvard has offered as an inducement to more than one man of small means whom it wished to employ for itself the probability of piecing out those means by teaching at Radcliffe.

In the early days of the Annex, Arthur Gilman was, to most persons, the whole visible administration. When the Annex was formally organized as Radcliffe College, Agnes Irwin, head of a school for girls in Philadelphia, became Dean. Miss Irwin was an accomplished and brilliant woman, a great-granddaughter of Benjamin Franklin. Miss Mary Coes (Annex 1887) was Secretary; Mrs. Louis Agassiz was President; Henry Lee Higginson was Treasurer; Professor William E. Byerly, whose long and unselfish service can never be overestimated, was Chairman of the Academic Board, which prepared, from year to year, the list of available Harvard courses. This Board served as a warrant to the Harvard Faculty that the work of every student recommended by Radcliffe for a degree met the requirements for the corresponding degree at Harvard; that Radcliffe was genuinely a Harvard for women. The only member of the Board who was not in the Harvard faculty also was the Dean. Even she did not vote on proposals affecting degrees; the right to vote for degrees at Radcliffe was contingent on the right to vote for degrees at Harvard. Recommendations for degrees at Radcliffe were sent for approval to the governing boards of Harvard; the diplomas signed by the President of Radcliffe were countersigned by the President of Harvard, who testified to the equivalence of Radcliffe and Harvard degrees.

Coeducation, except in graduate courses, was avoided by common consent; nor was it permitted in all graduate courses. Now and then a specially qualified woman was admitted to a small advanced course for both graduates and undergraduates which was given at Harvard and not at Radcliffe. On one or two occasions, greatly to the amusement of the Harvard faculty, a Harvard student has asked permission to take at Radcliffe a Harvard course not offered at Harvard in the year in which he needed it. The general feeling of both institutions is strongly opposed to undergraduate coeducation.

The main question for the public interest in a college is not ‘How is it organized?’ but ‘What does it accomplish?’ Accomplishment depends, in great part, on stability — certainly on enough stability to ensure existence and large intellectual opportunity. Here was an institution which secured its teachers year by year, dependent, so to speak, on their annual good will and subject to the sudden loss of those who were constrained to reduce their work. How could such an institution ensure the stability which brings endowment or even the stability which brings students who look ahead?

The answer is not so much how it could as that it did. Though unable to offer regularly some courses which it would gladly give, though unable to secure always for a course the same Harvard teacher who gave the course at Harvard, Radcliffe has steadily maintained a high average in the number of excellent courses offered and a high percentage of the strongest Harvard teachers. Slowly and surely it has developed in Harvard a moral responsibility, first for its continued existence, then for its scope and success. Beginning with next to nothing in money, having, a score of years ago, something like seventeen thousand dollars a year as its only unrestricted income outside of tuition fees, it has built up, in the accurately informed public, a confidence which has brought it bequests from persons not previously known to be its friends. It counts twice as many students as it once thought it could get or need; it has its chapter in Phi Beta Kappa; it has a college life independent, but by no means isolated; it has graduate students from many states and many nations; it has an excellent working library of its own and certain privileges in the Harry Elkins Widener Memorial Library of Harvard, one of the great libraries of the world. Last but not least, it is steadily moving toward a solid relation to Harvard, wherein it will share with Harvard the payment of a professor’s salary and the right to a proportionate part of his time. Its logical future makes it one of the great schools in Harvard University, of which even now it is, in fact if not in lawful name, an important part. All that seems wanting is a dowry large enough to maintain a full share in the costly teaching which Harvard maintains for itself.

My excuse for writing about this college and this college only is my certainty that the experiment which resulted in it and the function which it has achieved are not popularly understood and are peculiarly its own. Individuality is as important in colleges as in persons; in colleges for girls as in girls themselves. Though educational standards are necessary, what is called the standardizing of education means usually a leveling mediocrity and a deadening mistake. Girls who want coeducation, girls who want either the seclusion of the forest or the confusion of a great city, girls who want commercial training or domestic science, will find excellent institutions by which their wants are met. Even a beautiful and spacious campus — more is the pity — Radcliffe lacks. No reasonable being will deny that much which Radcliffe lacks is desirable, though not equally desirable to all girls. This college justifies itself by offering to women the intellectual food which Harvard offers to men, by offering it in such a community as Cambridge, near Boston but not of it, and in a relation to the social life of the community more natural than that of the isolated college; not undertaking everything, but undertaking one great thing and doing it well.

Witness to its work is borne not merely by its own bachelors of arts, but by the graduate students whom I have already mentioned briefly. Though the college has as yet no dormitory for graduate students except two or three small buildings which were once private houses, the instruction and the Harvard Library bring every year two or three hundred of these students, some of whom are brilliant women working for the degree of Ph. D. There are few better illustrations of the truth that a university is not buildings but teachers. The educational ideal expressed in the shopworn quotation about Mark Hopkins and the student at opposite ends of a log is impracticable; for, as President Eliot once said, there are not Mark Hopkinses enough to go round; but there is nothing impracticable in the ideal of bringing every student who has genuine promise within range of great teachers.

’By their fruits ye shall know them.’ For eighteen out of twenty successive years I attended the Commencement Dinner of the Radcliffe Alumnæ Association. I doubt whether there is anywhere a finer group of women. Some, like Olive Hazlitt, have distinguished themselves as scholars; some, like Sarah Wambaugh and Fannie Fern Andrews, as workers for the public good, whether in humanitarian causes near home or in international relations. What strikes a veteran observer is the growth of hundreds whom he first saw as crude freshmen into the accomplished women whom he sees now. What they got in college is so much greater than they knew it to be that it keeps growing with them and they with it. The result is a group of women who, with full appreciation of the lighter joys in life, keep what makes itself felt wherever they are and leavens the community in which they live — the best gift of a college to woman or to man, a constancy of earnestness.

Said Sir Walter Mildmay to the Queen: ‘I have set an acorn, which, when it becomes an oak, God alone knows what will be the fruit thereof.’