WENTY-FIFTH ANN IVERSARY
O CTO B E R T W E N TY - FIRST AND TW E N TY-SEC O N D
B 519769."
1910
THE FORMAL OPENING OF BRYN MAWR COLLEGE TOOK PLACE TWENTY-FIVE YEARS
AGO ON SATURDAY OCTOBER TWENTY-THIRD 1885 ADDRESSES WERE MADE BY
PRESIDENT JAMES E RHOADS PRESIDENT DANIEL C. GILMAN PRESIDENT THOMAS
CHASE AND JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL tº- - º g- tº º sº - º º


ORDER OF EXERCISES
FRIDAY EVENING, OCTOBER TWENTY-FIRST
EIGHT TO NINE O'CLOCK
Lantern Night in the Cloister Garden of the Library
Lanterns were first given in the autumn of 1886 by the Class of
1889 to the Class of 1890. The first Lantern Night was held in
1897. -
Procession of Sophomores through library cloisters. Presenta-
tion of lanterns by Sophomores to Freshmen to light their way
through the group system. Singing of “Pallas Athene” by Sopho-
mores. Freshmen's lantern song.
Ilaxxâg ’A6;vm, 6ed Maxdot’e, airočgev,
Mathjpuatog xal oróévovg, ‘Huiv orogotav Štěov,
2é trap' ºpieſ; fuev, ‘Huív avyrirvov dist,
‘Ipsborovoat out Öetv; Maxap tea, axovs,
*Axove / "Axovs 1 *Axove / "Axove /
‘Jéptºe vöv robº: A6xvovº,
'A et pavāj; poſotev
Aapatpóvovres rºv 6669,
Mełów pavów totobvres,
"Axove / "Axove /
Composed by Madeline Vaughan Abbott Bushnell, '93, Class Song, '93
and Bertha Haven Putnam, '93
NINE TO TWELVE o'cLocK
Director’s Dinner to Delegates, Faculty, and Other Invited Guests
in the College Gymnasium
Toast Mistress: President Thomas.
Subject of Discussion: Liberal versus Vocational College Training.
Speakers:
Mr. Howard Comfort of Philadelphia, President of the Board of
Directors of Bryn Mawr College—Welcome to Guests.
President Francis Brown, President of Union Theological Sem-
inary, New York City (Liberal Training).
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President Richard Cockburn Maclaurin, President of Massachu-
setts Institute of Technology, Boston (Vocational Training).
President Ellen C. Sabin, President of Milwaukee-Downer Col-
lege, Milwaukee (Vocational Training).
Professor John Dewey, Professor of Philosophy and Lecturer
in Psychology in Columbia University (Vocational Train-
ing).
Mr. Walter Hinds Page, Editor of The World's Work, New York
City (Liberal Training).
President Eugene A. Noble, President of Goucher College, Balti-
more (Liberal Training).
Doctor Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute for Medical
Research, New York City (Vocational Training).
Sir William Mitchell Ramsey, Professor of Humanity in Aber-
deen University, Scotland (Liberal Training).
Dr. Talcott Williams of The Philadelphia Press (Liberal Train-
ing).
President Charles Sumner Howe, President of the Case School
of Applied Science of Western Reserve University, Cleve-
land (Vocational Training).
Mr. James Wood of Mount Kisco, New York, Vice-President of
the Board of Directors of Bryn Mawr College (Liberal
Training).
President Cyrus Northrop, President of the University of Min-
nesota (Vocational Training).
Mr. Norman Hapgood, Editor of Collier's Weekly, New York
City (Liberal Training).
Dean Marion Reilly, Dean of Bryn Mawr College (Liberal Train-
ing).
President Abbott Lawrence Lowell, President of Harvard Uni-
versity (Liberal Training).
The addresses occupied one hour and forty minutes. Each
speaker was limited to five minutes, the time being marked off
by an automatic triangle. Three hundred and fifty guests were
present at the dinner.
SATURDAY, OCTOBER TWENTY-SECOND
TEN TO TwelvK-THIRTY O'CLOCK
Round Table Discussions in Assembly Room of Taylor Hall
An invitation to attend these discussions was extended to the
teachers of all the more important secondary schools for girls in
Philadelphia and the neighborhood. Great numbers of teachers
were present.
A.—Head Mistresses' Debate, 10.00–10.45
College Entrance Requirements versus Four Years' High School
Course. Do college entrance examinations benefit, or injure work
and standards in secondary schools?
Chairman, Dean Henry Burchard Fine, Dean of the Faculty of
Princeton University.
Debaters: Miss Edith Hamilton, Head Mistress of the Bryn Mawr
School for Girls, Baltimore, Maryland.
Mr. Stanley R. Yarnall, Head Master of the Friends'
Preparative Meeting School, Germantown, Phil-
adelphia.
Mrs. Elizabeth Ware Winsor Pearson, Vice-Principal
of the Winsor School, Boston.
Doctor Julius Sachs, Professor of Secondary Education
in the Teachers College, Columbia University.
Miss Catherine R. Seabury, Principal of St. Agnes
School, Albany, New York.
Miss Mary C. Wheeler, Principal of Miss Wheeler's
School, Providence, Rhode Island.
Miss Susan Braley Franklin, Head of the Classical De-
partment of the Ethical Culture School, New York
City.
Conclusion: Pro, Dean Fine, Miss Hamilton, Mrs. Pearson, Miss
Wheeler, Miss Franklin.
Con, Mr. Yarnall, Professor Sachs, Miss Seabury.
B.—Presidents' and Deans' Debate, 10.50–11.35
Lay Criticism versus College Teaching. Is it justified?
Chairman: President Cyrus Northrop, President of the University
of Minnesota, vice President Henry Smith Prit-
chett, President of the Carnegie Foundation for
the Advancement of Teaching, who was unable
to be present on account of illness.
Debaters: President William Herbert Perry Faunce, President
of Brown University.
Mr. Clarence F. Birdseye, Editor of The American
College.
Dean Edward G. Griffin, Dean of the College Faculty
of Johns Hopkins University and Professor of
the History of Philosophy.
President Marion LeRoy Burton, President of Smith
College.
Dean Ellen Fitz Pendleton, Dean of Wellesley Col-
lege.
Conclusion: Colleges are in process of reforming themselves from
within. Criticism to some extent justified.
C.—Scientific Professors' Debate, 11.45–12.30
Scientific Courses versus Literary, Historical, and Economic
Courses in American Colleges. Are they losing ground?
Chairman: President Richard Cockburn Maclaurin, President of
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Debaters: Professor Margaret E. Maltby, Assistant Professor
of Physics in Barnard College.
Doctor Jacques Loeb of the Rockefeller Institute for
Medical Research.
Doctor Florence R. Sabin, Associate Professor of
Anatomy in Johns Hopkins University.
Doctor Lilian Welsh, Professor of Physiology and
Hygiene in Goucher College.
Mrs. Ellen H. Richards, Instructor in Sanitary Chem-
istry in Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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Conclusion: If scientific courses are losing ground, there is no in-
trinsic reason for it.
The chairmen opened and closed the debates in two speeches of
five minutes each. The debaters were limited to five minutes each.
TWELVE-THIRTY TO Two o’CLOCK
President's Luncheon at the Deanery to Directors, Delegates,
Faculty, and Invited Guests to meet the Speakers of
the Twenty-fifth Anniversary.
Two-FIFTEEN o'cLock
Formation of the Procession in Taylor Hall
ORDER OF THE PROCESSION
Marshals
The President of the College and the President of the Board of
Directors
Board of Directors of Bryn Mawr College
Marshals
The Speakers of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary and the Senate of
the College
Deans of the College
Marshals
Delegates of Universities and Colleges open to women in order of
date at which their institutions admitted women as colle-
giate, graduate, or professional students, or taught them in
affiliated women's colleges
Delegates of Universities and Colleges not open to women in
- order of foundation
Marshals
Delegates of Learned Societies
Board of Directors of the Bryn Mawr College Alumnae
Association.
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Marshals
Delegates of ten Preparatory Schools which have sent not less
than thirty pupils to Bryn Mawr College
Marshals
Members of other University and College Faculties not Delegates
Marshals
Faculty and Staff of Bryn Mawr College
Fellows of Bryn Mawr College
Marshals
Graduate Scholars of Bryn Mawr College
Graduate Students
Undergraduate Students
Two-THIRTY O'CLOCK
Celebration of the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of the College in
the Cloister Garden of the Library
(On account of the inclement weather the anniversary exercises
were held in the college gymnasium.)
NATIONAL ANTHEM
O say, can you see, by the dawn's early
light,
What so proudly we hailed at the twi-
light's last gleaming,
Whose broad stripes and bright stars,
through the perilous night,
O'er the ramparts we watched were so
gallantly streaming!
And the rocket's red glare, the bombs
bursting in air,
Gave proof through the night that our
flag was still there;
O say, does that star-spangled banner
yet wave
O'er the land of the free, and the home
of the brave?
On that shore dimly seen through the
mists of the deep,
Where the foe's haughty host in dread
silence reposes,
What is that which the breeze, o'er the
towering steep,
As it fitfully blows, now conceals, now
discloses?
Now it catches the gleam of the morn-
ing's first beam,
In full glory reflected now shines on the
stream;
'Tis the star-spangled banner; O long
may it wave
O'er the land of the free, and the home
of the brave.
O thus be it e'er, when freemen shall stand
Between their loved homes and the war's deso-
lation,
Blest with victory and peace, may the heaven-
rescued land
Praise the power that hath made and preserved
us a nation.
Then conquer we must, when our cause it is
just,
And this beour motto—“In God is our trust,”—
And the star-spangled banner in triumph shall
W8. We
O'er the land of the free, and the home of the
brave.
PRAYER BY PROFESSOR GEORGE A. BARTON,
Professor of Biblical Literature and Semitic Languages
in Bryn Mawr College.
O God, in whom we live and move and are, we lift our hearts to
Thee in glad thanksgiving to-day for all the blessings which have
attended us as a college during these years. We thank Thee for
the founder of the college and his benefaction, for all who by gifts
have contributed to its upbuilding, for those who have given their
lives to its government and instruction, and for the earnest young
women who have formed its student body. We thank Thee for the
high ideals which have been conceived or nurtured here, and for the
noble work in which many are engaged who have gone out from this
place. With deep gratitude for the past we invoke Thy blessing
upon the college for the years that are to come. We know that
Thy blessings are not bestowed arbitrarily, but that they are given
to those who obey Thy righteous laws and perform Thy will. Help
us, we beseech Thee, and those who shall come after us, so to under-
stand Thy truth and to dedicate ourselves to its service that it
may be possible for Thy blessing continually to attend us. So
direct the purposes of those who administer the government of this
college or share in its teaching or its life, that at Bryn Mawr the
lamp of true learning and the light of pure religion may ever be
undimmed, and truth and righteousness prevail.
We invoke Thy blessing to-day upon those of our graduates who
are not here. Wherever they may be—bearing home burdens,
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sharing in industrial work, giving their lives as teachers, engaged
in social reform and the redemption of the slums, or as missionaries
carrying the light of life to the dark places of the earth—give them
the comfort and the help of Thy Spirit and make them able to
render efficient service to God and to bear the inspiration of chas-
tened and intelligently sympathetic spirits to mankind.
We invoke Thy blessing to-day, O God, upon all universities,
colleges, and schools. As in the past Thou hast made these institu-
tions the instruments of manifold blessings to men, prosper, we
beseech Thee, in the years to come, their work of instruction and
research. Reveal Thyself to those who faithfully study Thy works.
Help them to pursue truth with fearlessness and reverence. Enable
them continually to extend the boundaries of knowledge, and make
them wise with that wisdom which comes to the soul when it is
alone with Thee.
We thank Thee to-day for our land, for its liberal institutions, for
the freedom which it affords and the opportunities which we enjoy.
We pray that this college and all institutions of learning in this and
other lands may continue to send forth those who shall be blessings
to the nations. May there go out from them from year to year those
who are strong to penetrate the secrets of nature, to interpret the
beautiful, and to engage in that prophetic service which is to make
the kingdoms of this world the Kingdom of our Lord and Savior
Jesus Christ. Amen.
Addresses of Congratulation
PRESIDENT THoMAs: It is a great pleasure and honor to intro-
duce to you the eminent college president who for twenty-four years
has directed to an ever higher level the material and intellectual
destinies of the great woman's college which began its work of giv-
ing women a true college education in 1865, and thus became the
model and leader of us all—President James Monroe Taylor of
Vassar College.
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT JAMES MonROE TAYLOR
It is a day for hearty congratulation to Bryn Mawr on her adher-
ence to sound scholarship, her exaltation of scholarly ideals, and her
academic and her worldly success. For we all know—do we not—
that these are different aspects of success, that some institutions
have one, and some the other, and some both, and we congratulate
Bryn Mawr on her achievement in both these coveted directions.
In one aspect at least she is to be congratulated on having begun
her career of usefulness twenty-five years ago. There are advan-
tages in starting late. The hardest pioneer work is done for us,
and many a tough question has been threshed out, and we learn by
the experiments of others what to avoid, at least, and sometimes,
too, what to strive for. The way through the forest has been blazed,
to be opened and improved. The battle was a real one—it is still
fought in particular communities and in individual minds—which
settled a woman's right to an education at least as good as her
brothers could gain in our American colleges. Discussion had waxed
hot over the kind of education a girl should have. No more serious
mistake can be made in this matter than to assume, as some of our
educational leaders have, that in the beginning of this great move-
ment the men and women who stood for it were determined to give
a man's education, as then understood, to women. That is false
to history. They struggled with the question, how to adapt the
training of the American college to the fancied special needs of
girls, and they kept the old curriculum, in the main, because they
could not discover any more clearly than their successors have, a
better way of training the mind of a woman between eighteen and
twenty-two, or any specific differences of mental capacity or tend-
ency calling for a different method of treatment. The battle had
been fought through once and the issue settled, as far perhaps as
it ever can be. We are still sometimes infelicitously chided as hav-
ing given no thought to it; we are still criticized for not having set-
tled questions of vocational education for girls by those who have
not been able to settle them for boys. But a woman's right to
higher education, her ability physically and mentally to profit by
9
it, her capacity to use it in professional, social, and domestic life,
the maintenance, despite all fears, of her true womanliness, and the
failure of her education to unsettle all the foundations of the family
and society—these once vexed problems had been discussed until
we saw the truth with tolerable clearness before Bryn Mawr took
up her admirable work.
As I have regarded her career with intense interest from the point
of view of a fellow worker since her second year, I am disposed to
suggest as among her chief contributions of the twenty-five years,
first, the splendid emphasis she has put upon advanced scholarship
for women. I think her fine devotion of so large a part of her income
to fellowships and scholarships perhaps without parallel in our
country. It has been a steadfast devotion, too, untouched by the
considerable variations of interest in the educational world that
have sometimes forced the question as to the present desire for
these great helps to higher scholarship. But Bryn Mawr has been
steadfast; never has it yielded an inch of its purpose to offer women
the best that can be had.
I suggest again the generosity of her welcome to these scholar-
ships of the graduates of other colleges and universities. All over
our land there are women graduates of other institutions who owe
to this one the encouragement and possibility of their higher attain-
ments. Well may they rise up to-day and call her blessed!
She has insisted, once more, from the start, on a high grade of
scholarship in her faculty as essential to scholarly ideals in the stu-
dents. Only those of us whose memory and experience reach back
to her beginnings appreciate all that means for the American
college for men and women, and here Bryn Mawr's influence has
been marked and constant in American education.
Finally, she has broadened the social side of woman's college
life and helped to introduce an atmosphere of larger liberty than
women's colleges had known before her time.
These are but suggestions of the important influence she has
exerted in twenty-five years, and time would fail me to discuss them
further. We all rejoice in her success and her power, not the less
because we have our own ideals, and know the difficulty of main-
taining them in a worldly age. We may differ among ourselves as to
methods and as to theories, as to modes of teaching, as to the best
way of achieving results we all hope for. We must so differ as long
10
as we think, and have no master to compel a so-called and formal
unity. But we recognize ideals where we see them, and we are
proud to-day of a college that has stood for them under a leader—
may we not also say creator—who has never wavered, never lost her
courage, never abandoned her purpose, and who from the start till
now has been the inspiration of the admirable career of Bryn Mawr
College. None of our colleges bears more indubitably the impress
of the mind that formed it and has developed it, and we congrat-
ulate President Thomas to-day upon Bryn Mawr College, as we
congratulate the college upon its President and its great achieve-
ment.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: In introducing the next speaker I must
apologize for departing from strict chronology in order to be truly
coeducational and alternate duly the men and women college
presidents on our platform. Although both Wellesley and Smith
opened their doors in 1875, the charter of Smith College was
granted first, in 1871. It is a matter of the deepest regret to all
interested in women’s education that for reasons of health President
Hazard should have been compelled in last July to close her bril-
liant and successful administration of Wellesley College. We regard
it as a mark of her high regard for Bryn Mawr that she has con-
sented to bring us in person the congratulations of the college which
she has guided for eleven of the twenty-five years of Bryn Mawr's
existence so wisely and so well into ever broadening scholarly
achievement—Miss Caroline Hazard, President of Wellesley
College from 1899 to 1910.
ADDRESS BY Ex-PRESIDENT CAROLINE HAZARD
MADAM PRESIDENT:
I rejoice to speak once more for Wellesley College, and at the
express wish of the Faculty and Trustees to bring the congratula-
tions of an elder sister to Bryn Mawr. It is three months since
I have ceased to be the president of Wellesley, but possibly I can
speak with more appreciation of the value of college work, as my
special part in it falls into perspective.
In new countries the completion of twenty-five years is a very
appreciable portion of time, and this assemblage is gathered
11
together to congratulate Bryn Mawr upon the excellent achieve-
ment of this first quarter-century of its existence.
It has been especially fortunate to have had practically one
direction during all these years. For while President Thomas was
Dean and is still affectionately called “Dean Thomas” by many of
her older students, it was well understood that her foresight and
judgment were greatly relied upon by the administration, and that
her hand has been upon the wheel which has guided this ship into
its present port. No other college in America has perhaps such
unity of design as Bryn Mawr. Long acquaintance with the clois-
ters and walks of the secluded English colleges has enabled Presi-
dent Thomas to reproduce in a very beautiful manner the most
lovely features of those classic institutions.
It is fortunate for the whole country that the women's colleges
are somewhat strongly differentiated. The especial aims and
objects of each contribute to the good of all, and the good of all, in
its broadest sense, is the object of all the colleges.
At Wellesley we were unfortunate enough to lose the founder a
few years after the establishment of the college. Smith has been
under one strong and wise direction during the whole time of its
existence up to this present year. Vassar, in a way the predecessor
of us all, has had the able government of different men presidents,
and Holyoke, the pioneer in the education of women in this coun-
try, is notable for the devoted and brilliant service of both its first
and its latest president.
All of these colleges have had their differences of administration,
but all have recognized most truly that those differences of admin-
istration are for the sake of one Lord. Behind the education,
behind the desire for the education, is the call of life to prepare
women in this new country to meet the call of service, to take a
share in the vital life of the community. Such has always been the
aim of collegiate education for women. Is not that the aim in the
large sense of the collegiate education for men?
It may be said that it does no good to a girl to be able to con-
strue an ode of Horace, or translate a sonnet of Petrarch, but the
contention of those who believe, as I do, in the education of women,
is that it does help her. The exact word, the literal text never
helps. It is the spirit which quickeneth. If she has grasped the
beauty of an ode of Horace, if she has learned the principles upon
12
which a sonnet of Petrarch is constructed, if that principle and that
beauty has really permeated her life, her whole life will be nobler
and richer. The principles of the construction of a sonnet can just
as well be applied to the furnishing of a room, to the commonest
household task which will raise the whole of life instead of belit-
tling it. For it is the ennobling of life which we all stand for. It
is the enrichment and enlargement of the individual mind and
heart.
Just here and at this stage of women's education it seems to
me that there is a very important problem which we should pro-
vide for and take measures to help the solution of in so far as any
solution is possible.
All of the women's colleges turn out young women trained to
whatever degree they have been able to assimilate the training,
but certainly accustomed to some amount of daily work, some
tasks which are expected from them, and which it is their pleasure
to fulfil, and they are turned loose upon society. As one of my own
girls expressed it, “We are fifty-horse-power engines, and are set
to do two-horse-power work.”
The years of adjustment in any young life when it begins to find
itself must be years of difficulty, but for the college girl they are
years of especial difficulty. Where the happy solution of marriage
comes immediately, this time of strain is much abridged. Only
the other day one of my girls wrote me, “I am a mother, thank
God,” and begged me to come and see the way she was bringing
up her son to be an honor to Wellesley training, the son being at
the time some eight or nine months old!
But that is the spirit which we want to inculcate, the spirit of
the college itself taken out into the spirit of life, and here in Amer-
ica where the men are so busy with problems of state, with prob-
lems of developing the country, with problems of actual money
getting, some of the larger issues of life must be left to the women.
How they shall attack these larger civic problems must remain for
each community, or each group of women to decide.
I was talking to a distinguished psychologist, who is also a
physician, the other day, who told me that he had always made a
special study of the prayers of the saints. At first, this might seem
a singular thing. But he was taking up the subject not only from
the religious standpoint, but from the pathological. The Confes-
18
sions of St. Augustine and of the mediaeval saints, as well as the
Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, and the serene faith of Epictetus;
the struggles of the mystics of the Middle Ages, all show that the
problems before the minds of those early saints and heroes were
only a slightly different expression of our own modern questions.
They resorted to meditation and devout contemplation, rising
often to such a nervous strain that our modern psychologists pro-
nounce it abnormal, while we must seek to work off that same
necessity for devotion and for right living, not only in contempla-
tion, but in action.
God troubleth not Himself
Nor is by work oppressed.
His rest is in His work
And all His work His rest.
Goethe with his “Ohne Hast, ohne Rast” put it in a more mod-
ern form. But both the mediaeval mystic and the later poet recog-
nize that there is work to do. Underlying all education are the
great facts of the freedom of man's will encompassed by the liberty
of God, the relentless law of cause and effect, and the vital union of
the finite with the Infinite; it is to demonstrate these that all learn-
ing exists. It is not only the sane mind and the sane body which
we want to send our young women forth with, but with a noble
desire to help, with the aspiration to make the world a better world,
to be fellow-workers with God.
In so far as any of us have reached this ideal, in so far as we have
fulfilled this aspiration, we are to be congratulated. That Bryn
Mawr, by its individual means, and by its own method has accom-
plished so much in the first twenty-five years of its existence is the
reason of our assembling here to-day, and the reason for our con-
gratulations and heartiest good wishes to the President of this
institution.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: To the next speaker Bryn Mawr owes a
great practical debt. The Founder of Bryn Mawr College, his orig-
inal Trustees, and the present President of the College took counsel
with President Seelye in the early days before Bryn Mawr opened.
It is due to his advice to me in 1885, six months before Bryn
Mawr opened, that we introduced from the first and still maintain
here that wonderful system of detailed college accounting, then and
perhaps still unknown elsewhere, whereby the accounts of each
14
academic and residential building and each large and small busi-
ness department are as rigidly separated as if each were under
separate private ownership, and one dollar, at Bryn Mawr as at
Smith, is made to do the work of ten. This and many other good
things we owe to President Seelye who for thirty-five years, from
its opening until last September, has created, fostered, and pre-
sided over the largest woman's college in the world. Other col-
leges and universities grow poorer as prices and students increase.
Smith College only grows richer, and out of what are deficits else-
where accumulates the funds for many a stately building. I have
the honor to introduce to you that wizard of finance, the envy of
us all, President L. Clark Seelye, the revered President Emeritus
of Smith College.
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT EMERITUs L. CLARK SEELYE
PRESIDENT THOMAS:
My congratulations to you, and to the trustees, teachers, stu-
dents, and friends of Bryn Mawr College at this quarter-centennial
celebration are the more hearty, because I knew this college when
it existed only as a germinal idea in the mind of its founder. Thirty-
two years ago, only three years after Smith College had opened,
I had the honor and the privilege of a visit from Dr. Taylor and two
gentlemen whom he had selected as prospective trustees, and he
confided to me then his intention to found a college in which, if I
may quote his words from a memorandum I then made, “a liberal
education may be acquired by young women, as good, though not
necessarily the same, as is provided for young men in their best
colleges.” In view of what had been done at Smith, he asked me if
I would make some suggestions in reference to the organization, the
requirements for admission, the curriculum, and the buildings. I
told him as well as I knew how, from my brief experience, what I
thought he ought to seek and what to shun, and I was happy to
confirm his faith in the need and value of the education which he
proposed to give.
There were then only three colleges for women which could be
fairly said to provide a liberal education equivalent to that which
men were receiving. Although better equipped than any other
institutions which had previously been established for that purpose,
15
they were all in urgent need of ampler funds. Two were stillencum-
bered with preparatory departments. None had received large
gifts to supplement their original endowments. I had seen so often
the folly of multiplying unduly poorly endowed colleges for men
that I was anxious the folly should not be repeated in the edu-
cation of women. Accordingly,–I may as well confess—after
trying to state impartially and in the most attractive form my
ideal of a woman's college, I ventured delicately to suggest that
perhaps more might be accomplished if Dr. Taylor would use his
wealth to aid those already existing. Happily that ill-timed sug-
gestion of my youthful inexperience was not heeded, and your gen-
erous, far-sighted founder had the wisdom and the force to carry
out his beneficent intention and to select one of the most favorable
localities as a college site.
Time has fully vindicated his purpose. In view of what his bene-
faction has accomplished who can doubt that the higher educa-
tion of women has been benefited more than if he had given his
wealth to any other college? We can see now more clearly than we
could a generation ago that another college was needed to satisfy
the rapidly increasing number of women who were craving better
opportunities for a liberal culture. We, the representatives of other
colleges, rejoice together in reviewing to-day what this young,
vigorous sister college has done, and what she has helped others
to do. Few colleges for men or women can show during so brief
a period as rapid a growth in intellectual and material resources.
We congratulate you on this beautiful group of buildings, on the
financial sagacity of your trustees, on the scholarship of your
faculty, and on the many graduates who have gone hence to bless
the world with the wisdom they have here acquired.
We congratulate you on your fidelity to the highest college ideal.
The high standard of scholarship and womanliness which the
founder set at the beginning has not been lowered in deference to
the demands of utilitarian critics. Technical schools are needed
for both sexes, as was stated in the discussion last evening, but to
give these schools their greatest efficiency there must be also schools
where men and women are taught not how to get a living, but how
to get a freer and more abundant life. These colleges for women,
established here and elsewhere in order to give women facilities for
an intellectual culture as broad and liberal as has been offered to
16
men have already done much to change public sentiment and to
dispel the fears that higher education will undermine the health
of their students and will hinder them from making good house-
wives and mothers. They have conclusively shown that courses as
severe as those in colleges for men can be pursued by women with-
out detriment to their health; that the majority of college women
as a class grow stronger physically as well as intellectually; that
their intelligence does not unfit them for wifehood or maternity;
that they become more attractive and useful members of society,
and are able to do whatever it seems best for them to do with
greater satisfaction to themselves and others. Practical sagacity
has been one of their most conspicuous traits. There is no depart-
ment of household economy, art, or science in which their superior
mental training does not prove advantageous.
Much has been gained also by the unity of purpose and the
diversity of methods which have characterized the higher educa-
tion of women. In coeducational and affiliated colleges, as well as
in the institutions to which only women are admitted, there is
practically now a unanimity of opinion that no modifications of
the curricula are to be made on account of the theoretical infe-
riority of the female intellect. Perhaps, as Professor Browning has
said, “A woman could overcome the deep-rooted conviction of
inferiority only by meeting men and beating them by their own
academical standard.” This has been done. Side by side in the
same classes, subject to the same tests, winning often in competi-
tive examinations the highest prizes for scholarship, women have
demonstrated their capacity for that liberal culture which a college
represents. We may thank coeducational institutions for giving
them the opportunity to make the demonstration. Yet while the
aim has been the same, the leading colleges for women have had
an individuality of their own. None of them have felt constrained
to copy masculine models. They have solved in different ways the
same problems, and the variety of solutions has given to them a
breadth and versatility which will be of inestimable value. Out of
their varied experiences we have learned better what to avoid
and what to adopt, and the lessons will give to their education
a completeness which it would have lacked had there been less
diversity in the methods pursued.
Let me congratulate you on the increasing fellowship between
2 17
these institutions of learning—a fellowship delightfully manifest
on an occasion like this. There is a growing conviction among
them that if one member suffer, all the members suffer with it,
and that if one member be honored, all the members are honored
with it. There is a greater disposition to confer on subjects of
common interest, and to adopt those requirements for admission
and academic degrees which will promote the best scholarship.
No college now feels at liberty to take an independent course with-
out considering its effect upon sister institutions and secondary
schools. The Association of New England Colleges and Prepara-
tory Schools was formed the same year that Bryn Mawr College
opened. It celebrated last week its twenty-fifth anniversary.
Through that association and similar associations in the middle
and western states much has been accomplished in securing pro-
gressive courses from the lowest to the highest schools, and in reduc-
ing the waste of time and force which has often come where these
courses have not been intelligently correlated.
The day is also passing, if it has not passed entirely, when the
colleges for men are disposed to hold aloof from the colleges for
women and to distrust their scholarship. There was a time not
long ago when men lowered their academic standing in the estima-
tion of some of their professional compeers by accepting positions
in a woman's college, although in these colleges they found stu-
dents as responsive to the best instruction, an intellectual atmos-
phere as conducive to learning, and a recognition of the value of
instruction as ample, as could be found in the colleges for men. Now
the best colleges for men do not hesitate to fill vacancies in their
own faculties by calling professors and presidents from colleges
for women.
Let me congratulate you especially that the ideal of the gentle-
woman still dominates the schools for women where they have the
amplest opportunities of acquiring knowledge, and that in their
administration character has not been subordinated to scholarship.
Fortunate, indeed, is this college which has been from the begin-
ning under the formative influence of one, who, by her scholarship,
her executive ability, and her noble, forceful personality, has
shown conspicuously the value of the liberal culture she has done
so much to promote.
I congratulate you, President Thomas, upon the magnificent
18
results of your successful administration as Dean and as President;
and upon the encouraging and inspiring outlook which the future
presents. For you, I am persuaded, “The best is yet to be.” The
saying, “To him that hath shall be given,” is as true of institu-
tions as it is of individuals. What has been accomplished here in
a quarter of a century is the harbinger of more glorious achieve-
ments. As men see more clearly what intelligent women can do,
the benefits they confer, more abundant and generous provision
will be made for their education. More competent teachers and
better methods of instruction will come in consequence of the im-
proved educational facilities and the prolonged educational experi-
ence. Few institutions are longer-lived than educational. They
survive political revolutions and social transformations. On the
firm and broad foundations which have here been laid we may
confidently expect that ampler and more imposing superstructures
will be reared where women will have better opportunities to find
the truth, and to enjoy the freedom which only the truth can give.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: In the intellectually dreary years for girls
in the east and south of the United States before Vassar, Cornell,
Smith, and Wellesley became the goal of all ambitious girls Mount
Holyoke Seminary in the lovely valley of the Connecticut long
before any woman’s college had taken shape in the heart of its
founder was for three decades the centre of women's intellectual
life, the mother of countless other girls' seminaries and schools, and
the inspirer of the first colleges for women as they became in their
turn her inspirer. Her arduous development into a true woman’s
college, her substantial financial growth, her scholarly group
system of study, her ardent and loyal faculty of young women
scholars qualified by long years of preparation for teaching and
research are due to the courage and initiative of the woman who
brings us the congratulations of the oldest and at the same time
one of the youngest of our college sisterhood—President Mary E.
Woolley of Mount Holyoke College.
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT MARY E. WoollBY
Two years ago at the inauguration of President Garfield of Wil-
liams College, President Eliot spoke on some of the felicities of the
office of college president. I am not sure that he included the
19
opportunity of attending collegiate functions, but certainly there
is nothing in the presidential schedule which more clearly deserves
honorable mention. The charm of a day such as this—a charm
quite independent of the clouds—can be felt better than it can be
put into words. It is not only the beauty of the surroundings, of
buildings and campus, and of the anniversary festivities; not alone
the interest and inspiration of the exercises with their stimulus
to thought and to effort; not simply the help which comes from the
personal touch with those who are making history in the educa-
tional world;—more than all these, vital and real as they are, is
the inspiration of the work itself, the accomplishment of the past,
the promise of the future.
It is seldom, if ever, true that an institution is the achievement
of one person. Some members of this audience know better than
the speaker to how many men and women this college owes much,
not only in its inception, in the largeness of view and generosity of
gifts and of spirit which made it possible, but also in the devoted
service of this quarter-century. Yet it is not less true that the
progress of Bryn Mawr College, its place in the educational world,
is, to an unusual degree, the work of the woman whose name has
been identified with it from the beginning. One can hardly think
of the college without its President, or of its President without a
vision of the college. I should like to except one person from this
generalization and to tell a story which I have never had the temer-
ity to repeat to Miss Thomas, but to which, on this auspicious
occasion, it seems safe to refer. At the time of my own inaugura-
tion, several years ago, a note of regret was received from a dis-
tinguished professor in Oxford University, who evidently suffered
from absent-mindedness, and, quite as evidently, had not consulted
his invitation before declining it, for the note ran thus:
“DEAR Miss THOMAS:
“I am so sorry that I cannot be present at your inauguration as President of Mount
Holyoke College. And so you are going to leave dear Bryn Mawr? Well, I suppose
it is to enter upon a wider field of usefulness!”
The silver wedding of an institution offers a vantage ground
for looking backward as well as forward, for an estimate of its
achievement as well as for a prophecy of its future. No institu-
tion liveth to itself; the principles for which it has stood, the ideals
which it has attempted to realize, are important not only in its
20
own development, but also in the progress of the larger cause
which it represents. And such an occasion offers an opportunity
for a fair estimate not given by the daily life with its multiplicity
of details, demands, and duties.
Bryn Mawr College, starting with the hypothesis that women
are capable of the highest intellectual development, has stood for
the genuine in scholarship. Such a conception is fundamental
to the soundness of the college for women, as, in fact, it is funda-
mental to the soundness of any college whether for men or women,
—but that it is not easy to maintain, those who are working most
earnestly for it would be the first to admit. A few years ago the
dean of another college for women said of the President of this
college, “Miss Thomas is a missionary, and the mission is securing
and maintaining for women the highest intellectual opportunities.”
Such a mission is a service to a broader constituency than that
of the college world. An age of emphasis upon material aims and
ambitions peculiarly needs this influence to help in the realization
that the work of the scholar is a public service, vital to real prog-
ress; that every contribution, however small, to scientific knowl-
edge, to historical investigation, to literary insight, if genuine,
• increases the wealth of the world.
The emphasis upon genuine scholarship is valuable not alone in,
adding to the number of productive scholars, never a large con-
tingent. Our colleges for women have more than justified their
existence by what they have done for the teaching profession.
We are often reminded in these days that productive scholarship
and teaching power are not synonymous terms; neither are they
mutually exclusive. Happy indeed the student who has for his
guide in the intellectual field man or woman who is both scholar
and teacher! But although we may not expect productive schol-
arship in all our teachers, we should expect and require a genuine
scholarliness. Real teaching is a great enterprise, not a humdrum,
commonplace occupation, and like all great enterprises, it must
be inspired by a high ideal.
The logical outcome of emphasis upon the genuine in scholar-
ship, is emphasis upon the genuine in other phases of life. It is
no longer necessary to remind an academic audience that intel-
lectual development does not mean the sacrifice of development
in other lines, that an intellectual woman can be a womanly
21
woman as truly as an intellectual man can be a manly man. Per-
haps the time has come to turn the other side of the shield, and
to show that when men and women cultivate the real things, the
things of the mind and of the spirit, they are taking the surest
course to a genuine manliness and womanliness.
A second service of these twenty-five years may be taken as a
corollary to the first, namely, the adequate preparation of women
for the wider opportunities open to them. Bryn Mawr has had
no sympathy with the setting of one standard of excellence for
the work of a man, another for that of a woman, with the possible
exception that a woman should attempt to do it a little better,
because she is a woman! Granted the preparation, the college
would erect no warning signs in the educational field, saying,
“Thus far shalt thou go and no further.” She would not be true
to her inheritance if she did, for the Friends have ever been gen-
erous in their attitude toward women and their work. Women
are to-day justifying this confidence, and are better prepared
than ever before. They have a keener realization of the import-
ance of good health, and a clearer understanding of the way to
attain it; have had a more thorough training; and belonging to
the second and third generations of women with chances for "
higher education have inherited experience and traditions to help
them in their work.
There is still something to be done: it would be less stimulating
were the battle already won, if I may use so militant a figure in so
friendly an atmosphere! I hope the President of Bryn Mawr will
live to see the day when the faculties of universities will open their
doors a little more widely to cultivated and scholarly women.
Occasionally an administrative post formerly held by a woman is
relegated to a man on the ground of “greater business experience,”
and one tries to conceive of a Mark Hopkins or a Francis Wayland
considered simply as a financial agent. Important as is the finan-
cial question—and a college president is the last person to under-
estimate that importance—our educational leaders must consider
the investment not only of capital, but also of character; the
development not only of material resources, but also of those of
the mind and of the spirit. Leadership in education, as in any
other movement making for mental and spiritual progress, must
be determined, not by sex, but by the individual.
22
The twenty-five years of the life of this college have seen great
changes in the attitude toward the education of women. There
has been gain in the realization that women whose lives have been
broadened and deepened by education are needed in the home;
there is a gain in the breadth of opinion regarding a woman's fit-
ness for work outside of the home. But there is not yet a full real-
ization of the truth that this modern world with its tremendous
problems in every phase of its life needs all that thoughtful men—
and women—can bring to their solving.
“The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink
Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free.”
PRESIDENT THOMAS: For as many years as colleges have existed
in this country they have looked to Harvard College for light.
True to her ancient traditions of culture she is as she has always
been, the mother of the humanities, and never more truly so than
now, under that lover and cultivator of the humanities her new
President who has honored us by his presence here to-day—Presi-
dent Abbott Lawrence Lowell of Harvard University.
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT ABBOTT LAWRENCE LowLLL
When the Puritans, six years after they landed on the hills
between the forest and the sea, founded a college in order that
their descendants might not suffer from an illiterate ministry, they
little dreamed how great would be the advance of higher educa-
tion in America. Could they have foreseen the possibility of a
college for women they might have not regarded it with unmixed
approval; but if those sturdy forefathers of ours could come to life
to-day and see the college for women as it exists, they would be
struck with wonder and admiration. It is on behalf of these ances-
tors of our colleges and of their academic heirs that it is my privi-
lege to bring congratulations to Bryn Mawr to-day.
All American colleges have similar problems, and it is fortunate
that we are approaching them from different points of view. It is
a step forward to realize that these problems have not yet been
Solved, to realize that there is no one universal formula of general
application. The more we compare our ideas and exchange our
experiences, the wiser we shall be; the more we confess in public
23
our own shortcomings rather than those of others, the better we
shall be. Now the problems that lie before the American college
are greater than they have ever been before, because the American
college is doing a greater work than it has ever done before; and it is
hard for us as we look at them to keep our minds in a state of equi-
librium, being carried away by excess of neither praise nor blame.
The actual value of existing methods is difficult to estimate. As
Emerson wisely says, the world takes but one glance at the present
as it jumps over the gulf from the past to the future. The past we
can judge; the present we cannot judge. We are often told that
we are not producing the men that were produced under older
systems. What do we know about that? Can we judge of the
men of our own day? It is commonly said that the nearest judg-
ment to that of posterity is the judgment of foreign nations.
Measured by that standard, William James, whose open grave we
have just seen, stands higher in the estimation of Europeans as a
philosopher and as a man of letters than Emerson has ever stood.
I do not say this to compare the relative merits of the two—pos-
terity alone can do that—but to show that we must not take too
seriously the complaint that the men of to-day are inferior to men
of earlier generations. All that we can do is to rear the best men
that we can, to provide the best opportunities for their develop-
ment. -
Let us also avoid following too narrow a formula. Let us remem-
ber that not one kind of college merely is needed among us, but
many; that what any one chooses to call liberal training is worth
while, and that vocational training is also worth while; that pro-
ductive scholarship must be encouraged, but that teaching is not
less essential. Let us realize that vocational and liberal training,
though both are needed, are not necessarily provided in the same
institution; that productive scholarship and the power of teaching
are not necessarily combined in the same person. Let us above all
be perfectly clear in our own minds what is our particular task, and
let us do that. Let us be sincere with ourselves and with the world,
and let us not pretend that we are doing what we are not. There is
room enough in this country for every kind of educational work.
Probably never before since students flocked over the Alps to the
mediaeval universities, have young people crowded into colleges
in such numbers as in the present day. Whatever curriculum may
24
be announced, promising to produce almost any kind of heroes or
heroines, an American college is almost certain to be filled.
Now in regard to woman's education, I feel incompetent to say
anything which every member of this audience does not know
already. I can merely imagine what the future historian of Amer-
ica will say, and I think he will say something like this: “At the
end of the nineteenth century we find among contemporary writ-
ers a great deal of talk about the power of the almighty dollar, and
about the materialistic tendencies of the age. These statements
were doubtless much exaggerated, but they contain a kernel of
truth. At the end of the twentieth century we find no such state-
ments at all. The reason at first sight seems hard to find; but
when we look for it we discover a force which entered at this
period, and that was the rise of colleges for women. The energies
of the men were taken up with material things; they had no leisure
class, or else such men as possessed the power of leisure devoted
little of it to intellectual pursuits; and had it not been for the
education of their women, the Americans might have passed into
a period in which the light of scholarship would have become
well-nigh extinct. This marks the final transition of woman
from the barbarous period in which she was the drudge and pet
of men.” -
The recognized function of college presidents is to give advice
on ceremonial occasions to other college presidents, but in this case,
knowing my inability to do so, I will merely remark that one of
the important things is to maintain clearly in our minds the object
of the college, and the standard of college work. Bryn Mawr has
always had, under your guidance, President Thomas, the object
at which she was aiming perfectly clear, and has always kept her
standard high. Not avaricious of numbers, ever ready to put quan-
tity in the second place, she has nevertheless attracted from all
over the Union girls who were ambitious of a high education.
More than this, she has been notable for the excellence of her
instructing staff, and that after all is the supreme test of college
management. On behalf of an elder brother among the colleges it
is a pleasure to express admiration of a sister on her birthday.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: It is with very peculiar feelings of affec-
tion and gratitude that I introduce to this Bryn Mawr audience
25
the next speaker. In those early days when President Remsen was
Professor Remsen Bryn Mawr was affectionately dubbed Jane
Hopkins by the professors of Johns Hopkins from whom she
sought, and never failed to find, counsel. From that time to this
we have made no appointment in chemistry, and scarcely any
appointment in science, without President Remsen's advice and
approval. President Gilman of Johns Hopkins University spoke at
the opening of the college in 1885; President Remsen is here to-day
to congratulate us on our twenty-fifth anniversary. I hope that
the union between Bryn Mawr and Johns Hopkins may never grow
less close and that President Remsen may be here to bless the
college on the completion of its next twenty-five years' existence—
President Ira Remsen of Johns Hopkins University.
ADDRESS BY PRESIDENT IRA REMSEN
Sometimes we are called upon to offer congratulations when our
words falter because our hearts are not in them. On this occasion
I can say, if I have never said it before, that my heart is fully in
the congratulations which I offer.
Like President Seelye, my recollections of Bryn Mawr go back
to the time before it existed, and before it had a name. It so hap-
pened that two of the trustees of the original Board of Trustees of
Bryn Mawr were trustees of the Johns Hopkins University, one
of whom was Francis T. King, the other, the father of the president
of Bryn Mawr, James Carey Thomas. I have never known trus-
tees who regarded their work as seriously as those two men did,
with the possible exception of some other members of the original
board of the Hopkins. Their minds appeared always to be on the
problems, and so it came about that there were numerous occa-
sions when I talked with both these gentlemen in regard to the
great problem which Dr. Taylor had put before them. I was con-
sulted, not, I am sure, with any thought that my advice would be
of any value, but I was consulted in regard to the name of this
college. Mr. King said: “We are in grave doubt in regard to the
name of the college. It has been suggested that we call it ‘Bryn
Mawr College,’ but we do not know what Bryn Mawr means, and
it has been said by some persons that it is not an appropriate name
for a college for girls.” Later he came to me and said, “We find
26
that that name is perfectly harmless, and we propose to give the
college that name.” So that in a mild way I had something to do
with the naming of this wonderful creation.
Another reason why my heart is in the congratulations is that
I claim the President of Bryn Mawr as one of my students. Of
course, whenever a member of a family rises to distinction, the other
members of the family, however remotely connected with that
individual, claim relationship. Now I am, in this connection, a
relative far-removed, but I am proud to claim this connection
between the President of Bryn Mawr and my humble self. For did
she not sit for a while in my lecture room? The human mind has
an irresistible tendency to seek for the explanation of things;
behold the reason for her success!
The relations between the Johns Hopkins and Bryn Mawr, as
has been stated by the President, have been unusually close. In
many respects we have been able to aid Bryn Mawr, and Bryn
Mawr has been able to aid us. We have sent professors here, and
students have come to us, at least in the medical department. I
am not sure that any have come to the graduate school during the
brief period in which women have been admitted to it. We have
come to Bryn Mawr for professors. At one time we called one
professor and threatened to call a second, but the line was drawn
at the second. I felt so strongly impressed by the remarks made
by President Thomas on that occasion, that I let it go at one, but
we really wanted three that year, Miss Thomas!
On such an occasion as this one is expected to say something on
the education of women. I have talked a great deal about this
subject, but I must confess that I know very little indeed about it.
Some one said to me last evening, “Are you going to say anything
on the subject of the education of women?” I answered, “I think
probably the circumstances will lead my thoughts in that general
direction; I don’t know.” Then the question came, “Are you
going to tell the truth?” “Of course,” I replied, “I am a scientific
man.” And so I have a word, a rather serious word to say,
although nothing to interfere with the pleasure of this occa-
S1OIl.
We have admitted women to our medical school from the begin-
ning. The admission of women and the opening of our medical
School were due to the wonderful act of generosity and the insight
27
of one who now sits on this stage, and who is intimately associated
with this college. The medical school, which is a part of the uni-
versity, under the same government, owes its existence largely to
an act of Miss Garrett, with which Miss Thomas was closely con-
nected. I remember a conversation I had with these two ladies,
and they will remember that I took issue with them. I was in grave
doubt, first as to the effect of the admission of women, and then
in regard to the requirements which were at that time unheard of
in this country. I had my own misgivings, and I came besides as
spokesman of our medical faculty, but I made no headway. The
thing took place and the medical school has been open to women
since that time. That is a matter of history.
Now you may ask me a fair question, as to the result of my obser-
vation of women’s work in the school during these years. I answer
that I see no objection to having women there. I recognize it as
an act of justice to women to give them the opportunity. They
have been welcome members of our classes. I need not say that
they have behaved themselves. But, if you ask me whether the
presence of women has in any way influenced the school favorably,
I have made no observations that justify an answer. Certainly
their influence has not been unfavorable. Whether their presence
has affected the general conduct of the men I cannot say. Our
students are so well behaved that there is little room for improve-
ment; that may be due to the presence of women in the proportion
of six to eighty. I have made no careful investigation, but my
general impression is that the proportion of women who have risen
to distinction is about the same as with the men. We are entirely
Satisfied with the arrangement, and so far as the requirements are
concerned, in regard to which we had great misgivings, we are also
entirely satisfied, and believe it was a wise move to adopt this
standard.
Now, as regards the second question—the admission of women
to our graduate school. We do not admit women to our collegiate
department; we have an excellent woman’s college in Baltimore,
and we have no thought of competing with it. We did, however,
a few years ago decide to admit women to our graduate school. We
were the last of the universities that emphasize graduate work to
admit women. There was a little question on the part of a few pro-
fessors; there is still, to be perfectly frank—I am a scientific man.
28
The women were to be admitted on the same terms as the men to
the advanced classes, unless a professor objected. There were a
few objectors, but they found the majority against them so over-
whelming that we have not heard from them since. The trustees
gave not a dissenting vote. The thing came spontaneously. If
we had tried it a few years ago, it would have failed. We admit
women to our graduate school, not to the undergraduate classes.
That is our salvation. It would have been fatal to the university
if women without proper preparation had been admitted as special
students. I do not know what these graduate students are going
to do. At first we thought they were going to take everything away
from the men. There was an accumulation of good material to
be drawn upon. One woman was so much superior to any man
who had been in the department chosen by her that the professor
in charge seemed to have visions of the intellectual millennium.
We do not expect to keep that up. We are in the experimental
stage, an interesting and important stage.
I have nothing further to say except to repeat my congratula-
tions—my heartfelt congratulations. We have taught you some
things; you have taught us some things; and as I look over these
beautiful grounds, and especially the beautiful buildings, I was
almost going to say that my heart is filled with envy, for if there
is one thing above another that we wish to learn at the Hopkins,
it is how to keep up standards and at the same time be beautifully
housed. Perhaps if we come often enough to Bryn Mawr we may
learn.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: A renowned member of our former Bryn
Mawr faculty, himself a great teacher, said in public recently that
famous as, in his opinion, Bryn Mawr women were destined to
become, Bryn Mawr men, members of the present and former Bryn
Mawr faculties who had been developed at Bryn Mawr into great
teachers and scholars, were at the present time even more famous.
One of these famous Bryn Mawr men who have carried Bryn
Mawr's methods to every part of the United States will speak on
behalf of the former faculty of Bryn Mawr—Professor Paul Shorey,
formerly of Bryn Mawr, now of the University of Chicago.
29
ADDRESS BY PROFESSOR PAUL SHOREY
When my eminent predecessor began to protest something too
much concerning his resolution to tell the truth, I suspected at first
that he was going to repeat a story which has been going the
rounds of the newspapers, how at a suffragist meeting a lone man
was challenged to give his views of the subject and replied stam-
meringly, “I-I c-c-c-couldn’t, ma'am—there are ladies present.”
It is natural that presidential personages should speak in praise
of an institution that has trained so many of their daughters and—
their faculties, but I hardly know why the honor of speaking in
behalf of your first faculty has devolved on me, unless it is because
I am one of the few remaining members of that distinguished body
who is not a college president, or who is not being groomed for
some other presidency.
It is now twenty-five years since we heard the keynote of Bryn
Mawr's intellectual inspiration struck by my own old teacher,
Lowell—the other Lowell, and it is nearly twenty years since my
own too brief connection with Bryn Mawr came to a close.
“Ah! Twenty years! It cuts all meaning from a name.”
says the poet whom we used to quote most fondly and frequently
in '89. It may be that the affections of professors of Greek are less
volatile than those of poets; Bryn Mawr still means for me what
she must ever mean for all who have truly received her initiation—
she means that indescribable blending of intellectual austerity
with the enthusiasms and the ardent idealisms of the “spirit of
beautiful youth” which the great Italian Platonist called “il
amoroso uso dell' intelletto.” To those who have genuinely expe-
rienced this “renascence” of the soul, the years can bring no sense
of alteration. No fair stranger's eyes—or edifices—of gray have
brought to me any wavering in this my first allegiance. And when,
from lustrum to lustrum and decade to decade, I am permitted to
“revisit these glimpses” of Diana, I do not
“Find my Marguerite changed
With all her being rearranged,
Passed through the crucible of time.”
The appealing girlish meagreness of the unripe—not to say the
“ungrateful”—age has, it is true, given place to the triumphant
80
bloom of opulent maturity, and the original quaker bonnet of
Taylor perched upon her crown, and the “friendly plainness” of
Merion draped over her shoulder, are recognizable only as piquant
foils to the crenellated and machicolated splendor of architectural
investiture, and the rich hues of the now luxuriant foliage, touched
by Autumn's fiery finger, with which she has arrayed herself for
this festival day. But the spirit is the same. The soul which
creates the form is unchanged. She still guards the fire within.
You see, ladies, that I am not in the least afraid, secure as I am
in the sense of an inner seriousness, to toy with feminine symbols;
and a very slight challenge would set me on quoting “The Princess”
in spite of the animadversions that Mr. H. G. Wells has passed on
the young women of Wellesley because they still read that effete
mid-Victorian sentimentality, when they might be practising to
follow in the steps of Ann Veronica.
What should I say in these few minutes? I am merely the
mouth-piece of a sentiment—the sentiment of those whose privi-
lege it was to take part in the fair beginnings of the happy time
whose glad consummation we celebrate to-day. The higher edu-
cation of women is a serious topic, but the patronizing discussion
of it from the platform by gentlemen of my years is not serious at
all. A sense of humor in this matter is one of the many rewards of
twenty-five years spent in the teaching of women.
When the eminent French psychologist, M. Alfred Fouillée,
solemnly lays it down that the French language is nicely adapted
to the capacities of the feminine mind, but that women cannot
learn ancient languages, I am irresistibly reminded of an ingenuous
lad in one of my first classes at Chicago. During a week's absence,
I had left my Plato class in charge of a Bryn Mawr graduate of '89.
On my return the youth came to me with a subdued and awestruck
expression and said, “Professor, I used to think girls couldn’t learn
Greek; now I think nobody else can.” How should we go about to
enlighten Professor Mahaffy whose shrinking modesty once con-
fided to me that it must be most embarrassing to interpret to young
women—guess what!—the Alcestis. But these pronouncements
and prejudices of gentlemen of Turkish proclivities—of old-Turkish
proclivities—are no longer interesting even as jests. The only liv-
ing issue today is the argument, already debated in your round-
table discussions, that the education of woman ought to be special-
31
ized with reference to her probable vocation. This educational
sexualism bears a perilous resemblance to the sectarianism of the
backwoods trustee who asked a professor if he couldn’t manage to
infuse a little more of the particular Baptist spirit into his chem-
istry. The problem, so far as it is one, confronts men and women
alike. It may very well be true that the education of the masses
ought to be more nicely adjusted to vocation than has been the
case in the past. But how does that concern collegiate education,
which is and always will be for the minority—the spiritual leaders,
official or unofficial? Is there any better preparation for their
leadership than four years of youth consecrated to the disinter-
ested intellectual life? “Full soon the soul shall have her earthly
freight.” Concede, what is not true, that the vocation of all edu-
cated women is marriage. Is conscious preoccupation with details,
that after all experience must teach, a better preparation than the
unconscious development of theintelligence and the sympathies that
will make of a woman a companion as well as a cook and a nurse?
Whether for men or women, a prematurely specialized vocational
training can at the best save us from a few fumblings and missteps
at the beginning of practical life, and at the worst it serves as a
pretext for the confusion of the college ideal and the dissipation of
the limited attention of those brief, irrevocable years. Profes-
sional expertness and technical virtuosity may be and are devel-
oped as needed in after years. But few indeed are those who hab-
itually dwell on a loftier plane of intelligence and emotion than
that on which their college leaves them on commencement day.
The mission of the college, then, is not in the narrower and more
immediate sense of the words “preparation for life.” It is to estab-
lish a higher level of thought and feeling on which to live.
It is not because Bryn Mawr is a college for women that we honor
her and pay homage to Miss Thomas to-day, but because through-
out this quarter of a century of educational unrest she has con-
sistently affirmed and courageously maintained the true ideal by
which the American college—for men or women—must stand or
fall. Beneath all the waste welter of recent debate about our col-
leges there is but one real issue. Our great, intelligent, easy-going,
“pragmatic” democracy makes a fetish of primary education, and
is forced by knocking its head against facts to accept professional
and technical training. But it is at heart skeptical of the finer and
32
less obvious values of discipline and culture which the college rep-
resents if it represents anything. And the question of the day and
the hour is: Will the colleges have the courage to reaffirm this
ideal and win over democracy to the acceptance, if not to the full
comprehension, of it, or will they compromise it away in conces-
sions to the play spirit on the one hand and the utilitarian spirit
on the other, and so convert themselves into social clubs or tech-
nical schools?
Now for twenty-five years Bryn Mawr has been far more than a
woman's college, in that she has consistently stood for the right
and true ideals on this all-important matter. I do not mean that
she has never compromised her ideals. Bryn Mawr and Miss
Thomas are human, and are subject to human defailances; but
throughout the twenty-five years the keen air of the Bryn Mawr
class room has been somewhat harder to breathe, both for the
malingering student and the incompetent instructor, than has the
air of any of our great universities. Bryn Mawr's special work for
the higher education of women, her pioneer work—if the other
women's colleges will allow it to be so called—is done. That ques-
tion is settled. She should no longer dissipate her attention or
waste her emotions on dead controversies. She enters upon her
second quarter of a century not as a girls' school, but as an equal
co-worker, in many respects a leader, in the fellowship of the better
American colleges. As such she receives to-day the congratula-
tions and good wishes of her peers. As a representative of the
University of Chicago, I bring here those of a younger pioneer
institution, which, though sometimes misrepresented and often
misunderstood, has also known how to reconcile the necessities
of a given situation with the unswerving maintenance of an ideal—
a university rather than a collegiate ideal—but that matters little.
Speaking here a year ago, I said that the University of Chicago,
amid all inevitable concessions to American, to western, to local
conditions, had endeavored in its final and authoritative tests to
maintain the standards of Oxford or Berlin. Your stenographer
reported me as saying that the University of Chicago had tried
to maintain the standards of Bryn Mawr. I am by no means
certain, President Thomas, that the stenographer was not essen-
tially right. -
PRESIDENT THOMAS: The next speaker needs no introduction
to a Bryn Mawr audience. Bryn Mawr loves him and he loves
Bryn Mawr. Bryn Mawr College is proud to share in common
many graduates who are the fairest jewels in her crown with the
Brearley School, one of the largest and best of the five hundred
and ten secondary Schools that have prepared girls for Bryn
Mawr during the past twenty-five years, whose great Head Master
has consented to speak on behalf of the Bryn Mawr fitting schools
—Mr. James G. Croswell.
ADDRESS BY MR. JAMEs G. CRoswell,
You have observed—have you not?—a growing eloquence in
speech after speech on the subject of the charms of Bryn Mawr,
the campus, and the beauties of the exterior of this college. Per-
mit me to say that I feel it too. I should like to be outside in that
sunset as well as any of you. I should therefore cut as short as I
may what I have to say. But I shall ill represent my feelings, or
the privilege which I have enjoyed of hearing all that I have heard
here, if I did not take time to offer, at once, in the name of the
schools I have the honor to speak for, our gratitude for the delicate
and gracious hospitality which has been given us to-day. It was
like Bryn Mawr. It is characteristic as well as gracious that she
should think in the hour of her happiness not less than in the hour
of her need of the preparatory school, in the hour of her glory not
less than in the hour of her necessity; and we therefore come to
offer, with thanks and gratitude, our homage to our liege lady, not
laurels, but our swords, for she is a good soldier in the war for the
liberation of humanity. That Bryn Mawr has need of us we are
glad to feel. A college without undergraduates is, however eminent
its scholarship and high its ideals, an impossibility, a chimaera
bombinating in a vacuum. I come to tell you, as a prophet, there-
fore, not less than as a representative of the past, of the long race
that shall your spacious courts adorn. I see a vista that fills me
with joy, of the future children of Bryn Mawr, as inheritors from
those of the past, who will be coming up from our schools, through
the millenniums yet to be, to wear the colors of our family arms
forever.
Again, I should ill justify my privilege if in speaking for the
schools I did not at once try to express the personal gratitude of
34
us school teachers to the President of Bryn Mawr. When I took
the headship of my school—to compare small things with great—
the president of my alma mater said to me, “You will need two
things to be head master of a school: you will need courage once
a week and patience all the time.” We feel, Miss Thomas, that
we have much of both to thank you for, and as we may say things
in America on the platform that even friendship may not say in
private, we as a body would like to express our recognition of your
great significance to the secondary schools. We thank you for
your patience and courage. When you work with us, when you
work for us, and, if I may add one more to Dean Reilly's phrases,
not less but most when you work against us. For if the blood of
martyrs is the seed of the church, quarrels with the dean's office
are the seed of salvation to the schools.
We thank Bryn Mawr not only for her inspiration, but for other
and more valuable things. It is beautiful to be here. It is inspir-
ing to feel kindness; and for the care and kindness of this college
to its—may I say—vassals we give thanks; but “not for these
sweetnesses only do we raise the song of thanks and praise,” but
also “for her obstinate questionings.” It is her Spartan entrance
requisition that gives us our deepest vitality. For that we thank
her above all.
And now I have to thank you very briefly for three things that
our girls rather than ourselves have received. First, for the happi-
ness they have received at your hands. That sounds American
and it sounds paternal, but we American parents cannot help our
feeling of affectionate gratitude when we think of the happy home
our children have found here. One of my girls once said to me,
when I asked of her doings here, “Mr. Croswell, for the first time
in my life I saw the spring come here.” Our children have seen the
spring come here, the spring of the year, the spring of the day, the
spring of life. How can we not rejoice in that? And I thank you
for the great gift they have here inherited in their springtime which
we all recognize, and which none of us can name. Sometimes we
call it “culture,” and sometimes we call it womanhood, virtue,
àpetſ, virtus, -we know this experience as we know poetry, and
we find it as hard to define. For this change from girl to woman
in the name of my children I thank and bless Bryn Mawr. In the
number of girls who have come here the percentage of those who
35
have benefited in this way is high. May I tell you what it is in
my school? It is one hundred per cent. I have never known a
girl from my school who did not come back better for her stay
here, some thirty, some sixty, some an hundredfold. And the
third thing I thank you for is the initiation of my children into the
intellectual life, the life of science. This touches a hard question,
introduced again and again into our controversies. I cannot,
for my part, believe the intellectual life is ever to be closed to
women. The world cannot remain permanently half slave and
half free; the sexes cannot remain permanently one liberal and one
servile; there is no reason for such a thing in our civilization; there
is no cosmic and biological reason; the only reason we tolerate
this injury is a social one. But “Society” has been wrong about
many things, especially about its women. For five hundred years
people thought a woman could not be religious and married; it
still thinks, apparently, that she cannot be educated and married.
This cannot but mean that again society has taken a shadow for
substance. The day is certainly coming when the world will
emerge from the last shadow of its errors with regard to women,
and all shall drink deep at the fountain of life.
But I will not go on longer. We have but one thought for Bryn
Mawr to-day;--if the Lord listens to us, as I think he does to those
who have to do with little children,_we school teachers have but
one prayer. We pray for the peace of Bryn Mawr; may they
prosper that love her.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: Every college has its being in its alumnae.
For them it exists. In them it finds its immortality. From these
loyal and devoted daughters of Bryn Mawr, the famous Bryn Mawr
women who are, and still more, are to be, and from the Academic
Committee of the Alumnae whose conferences with the faculty of
the college have originated many educational policies—birthday
greetings are brought to their alma mater by the Chairman of the
Academic Committee, sometime Warden of Sage College of Cor-
nell University, one of the many deans and college teachers Bryn
Mawr is sending out, Mrs. Louise Sheffield Brownell Saunders.
36
ADDRESS BY LOUISE SHEFFIELD BROWNELL SAUNDERs
I stand here on behalf of the alumnae to congratulate our beloved
college on the attainment of her majority, to pray for her health
and long life, and above all for her strength and goodness.
We alumnae of Bryn Mawr feel ourselves so a part of the college
that to praise her would seem to praise ourselves. Yet just the
fact that she has always encouraged us to feel thus a part of her, is
one of the chief reasons why we have a right to praise her.
For all the colleges of America have been finding out the same
thing. They start of course independent of alumni; there comes a
time when they find these young creatures, their children, grown
into a force which must be reckoned with, but which, wisely
enlisted, may be of the most precious service. Hence our colleges,
the country over, have been rearranging their scheme of manage-
ment to let their alumni take a hand in it; and now the college
that has not almost a quarter of its board alumni members finds
itself in an ever decreasing minority. Presently it will find itself
in solitude.
Parallel with this movement I find another newer channel for
alumni influence creating itself. This is a smaller representative
council of alumni alone. It calls itself Graduate Council, Advisory
Board, in our own case, Academic Committee: the name varies,
the thing is the same. Alumni, like the rest of the world, have a
weakness for hearing their own voice. This lesser committee utters
their voice, formulates their will, gives vent to their feelings: in
short it enables alumni to experience that old human joy, the joy
of self-expression.
The idea of such a committee is young, but it is spreading at an
amazing rate; two colleges, even within the small circle of my
knowledge, have caught the contagion within the last few months.
The colleges which have not yet done so will, I believe, soon develop
something of the sort, for it answers a real need.
Now our Bryn Mawr was among the earliest to develop such a
committee; in fact with us it even antedates the representation of
the alumnae on the Board of Directors. And our college is one in
which the relation between alumnae and college is peculiarly close.
Those of you who know me well will have been wondering how I
have come to find myself in the distinguished company in which I
37
stand to-day. I am here as proxy for the alumnae; it is as their
emissary that Bryn Mawr has placed me among this royalty of
the college world. Could you have more conclusive proof of her
partiality, her solicitude for her alumnae?
There are many reasons why it is worth while for a college to
have her alumni knit up very closely with her. I can make no
attempt to exhaust them. But thus much I may say.
Most of the students who come to a college are sent by its
alumni. No college can thrive when they are alienated from it.
The business that fails to get successive orders from the same
customers will soon go into bankruptcy. The alumni are the
customers of the college. An alumnus has concluded his first pur-
chase when he graduates. Will he come back for a second pur-
chase? That is, will he send his boy? The welfare of the college
hangs upon the answer to this question.
No less, the alumni of a college ought to be for her the main
providers of money, their own, or other people’s. The greatest
wrong, to my thinking, in the administration of the American
college is its imposing upon the president the task of keeping the
wolf from the door. The money-getting brain is if anything com-
mon in our day and generation; the brain of the great college presi-
dent is always of the rarest. It is too fine, too specialized an instru-
ment to be put to such a use. It is chosen for its capacity to do
another sort of work; it ought to be used for that work. Here and
there, for the service of the state, a president may leave his college
for another task, as the president of our great neighbor university
in New Jersey has done, but it should not have to be for money-
getting.
Our President has devoted herself in this as in every other way
to the service of Bryn Mawr; the fact remains that the work is ours
rather than hers to do. We have been happy in trying to do it.
Of the quarter-million dollars which my fellow alumnae have col-
lected within the past six years, over $100,000 was in sums of $100,
or less. Proof is there of their readiness to work for the college of
their love.
A wise president will not fail to seize, on behalf of the college,
upon the enthusiasm and love of the alumni, to harness this young
energy to service. Our President has done this for us. She has
done other things and beautiful things for the college: you have
38
just heard them spoken of by tongues more eloquent than mine;
but this is her supreme inspiration for us, she has poured into
every one of us some measure of her own passion for work. As
undergraduates we felt the stimulus; we can never come back again
without feeling a revival of the old ardor to take part, to work, to
get something accomplished.
Fellow Alumnae, that we have accomplished something, means
only that we must do much more. Bryn Mawr deserves all that
we can do for her. As I watch, in other colleges, the difficulties of
the alumni to get themselves expressed, their sense often, of hostil-
ity on the part of the college to their so-called interference, their
jealous eagerness to take their part, too, towards developing the
life they love, I count us happy indeed in our golden experience here.
Those of us who were the old Bryn Mawr remember the days
here when the college was little known, and so small that we all
knew each other. Since then a new Bryn Mawr has arisen, greater
far than ours, a little commonwealth now in herself, crowned with
honors in which we have borne no part. Yet always when we have
come back we have found recognition, a place kept warm for us, a
welcome that makes us of the old, a part too of the greater, new
Bryn Mawr.
She seems strange to us, this fair new commonwealth, but with
a beautiful and beloved strangeness: we are beginning to discover
on what a star we were born. We of the little, old, intimate days
come back to such a lustre as this, and know it too for ours, the
hundreds of friends, the sense of sure establishment, the happi-
ness of public approval, the years stretching shining into the future.
The old Bryn Mawr bids hail to the new, and God speed.
PRESIDENT THOMAS: The great Shakespearean scholar and man
of letters who has made his native city of Philadelphia, that ancient
haunt of the Muses, again a place of pilgrimage for scholars the
world over, to win and retain whose approbation has been Bryn
Mawr's most highly prized achievement, has consented to crown
our twenty-fifth anniversary by his presence and his golden-tongued
Oratory—Doctor Horace Howard Furness of Philadelphia.
39
ADDRESS BY DR. HoRACE. HowARD FURNESS
May it please you, O fair and venerated President—yes, vener-
ated, for though young in years, in sage counsel you are old!—and
Ladies and Gentlemen:
There is one prayer which may be appropriately breathed every
hour of the day, in every month in every year, by every descendant
of Adam; it is, “suffer us not to be led into temptation.” Of course
the temptation will never be the same, but will for ever vary with
the suppliant. At this very instant there lodges in my breast
this same unspoken prayer, and to you all as to ghostly confessors
I will confide it. It is that I be not here and now tempted to indulge
the garrulity of old age.
But how can I restrain my tongue when I regard the unprece-
dented growth of this college, and mark the wonders, wrought by
one master-mistress mind, on this spot, dedicated twenty-five years
ago to the sacred cause of Education, with its attendant Culture
and Research?
Ah, that word Culture! How is it to be defined? We might as
well attempt to describe the shape and features of Proteus. Yet
we all recognize it at once. Five minutes were enough to reveal
to any stranger Edmund Burke's greatness and culture. It does
not come by nature; it is an acquirement. And if an acquirement,
it can surely be taught. But this is just where our definition of
Culture meets its greatest difficulty; it can not be taught. Yet it
is one of the chief aims of education. Habits, however, may be
taught. And among habits there is a certain habit of the mind,
which, happily for us, will result in culture. And this habit is
engendered by a love of knowledge so all-embracing that not a hair's
space in our minds will be suffered to remain uncultivated. It
must be like the fires which the Persians burned on the mountains,
flaming night and day and never to be quenched. Its fuel is all
knowledge, whether in the heavens above, in the earth beneath, in
the waters under the earth, or in the universal mind of man. The
wider our horizon, the greater our culture. Humanly speaking,
to be omniscient you must be omnivorous.
But has this culture any depth? Is it not superficial and shal-
low? Ay, it is superficial and shallow. Let us boldly avow it. It
is only when we disavow it and pretend that it is deep that it
40
becomes disgraceful. As the Talmud says, “Teach thy tongue to
say, ‘I do not know.’” Moreover, is not superficial knowledge
better than no knowledge at all? Is not a shallow lakelet, with mar-
gent green, in a violet-embroidered vale, with lilies rocking on its
breast, better and fairer than an idle, arid desert where no life is at
all?
Are we then all of us doomed to superficiality and shallowness?
Ah, no! Heaven-gifted minds there are, who, purposely closing
their eyes to the allurements of culture, find their life in searching
after truth to the very centre, and, in this service, scorn delights
and live laborious days. They are like the diamond drills of Arte-
sian wells, which force their way through stubborn stone and rug-
ged rock, until at last a fountain of the waters of truth gushes
upward, glittering in the forehead of the morning sky, whereat all
scholarship may quaff reviving draughts, and arid, infertile, untried
plains yield waving harvests for all.
Finally (you see I have not yielded to my temptation), to these
two high aims—Culture for all, Research for the few—this ground
was dedicated, and they have been, from that hour, cherished and
fostered by one all-pervading spirit, at the music of whose pleading
voice the very stones have taken architectural shape and builded
domes for learning, with corridors which will forever re-echo her
immortal footsteps. Bearing the personal reflection of her high
ideals, from this centre are gone forth annual waves, in ever widen-
ing circles of sweetness and light, culture and deep scholarship,
whereof the undying blessings to mankind throughout the ages no
mortal can compute.
Song by the Students: “Manus Bryn Mawrensium”
Omitted on account of the lateness of the hour.
Manus Bryn Mawrensium, Omnesque jam scientiae,
Laetissimae puellae, Sunt nobis tamguam joci,
Inter doctas gentium Professor Linguae Anglicae
Fulgentes sicut stellae. - Nos docet bene loqui.
Illius fausti temporis Necnon in mathematice
Sumus praecursores, Adeo sumus versatae,
Cum licebit feminis Ut numeremus facile
Fieri Doctores. Quot annos sumus natae.
41
Nos docet biologia Tam doctas nequis metuat
Ranunculos secare, Cum venit hora sera,
Et chimia monstrat Supra “Desipimus in loco” at-
Percoquere et arpare. Que “linquimus severa.”
Latine et Germanice Calculos caeruleos
Sumus eloquentes, Habeant aliae sibi,
Et Graece et Hispanice Intuere oculos
Legimus currentes. Caelum in est ibi.
Namguenos monstramus jam
Bene convenire
Doctrinam atque gratiam
Placere atque scire.
Nonne Sumus omnium
Doctissimae puellae,
Manus Bryn Mawrensium,
Fulgentes sicut stellae?
Composed by Class Song '89.
Professor Paul Shorey
PRESENTATION OF DELEGATES TO THE PRESIDENT AND MEMBERS
of THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS AND FACULTY OF BRYN MAWR
COLLEGE
(It was intended that all the Delegates should cross the platform
and present in person their congratulations, but owing to the late-
ness of the hour this ceremony had to be omitted.)
CLOSING ADDRESS BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE COLLEGE
The President's address is here printed in full—on account of its historical interest,
although owing to the lateness of the hour only the paragraph concerning the first
President of the College and a few other sentences were actually delivered.
Before beginning what I have to say I am sure that I may speak
for the Directors and Faculty of the College, as well as for myself,
and express our heartfelt gratitude for the words of approval that
have been spoken of Bryn Mawr. Praise like this from those
who know whereof they speak is indeed an incentive to grow worthy
of it.
I beg to assure the illustrious presidents of Johns Hopkins and
Harvard and of our four great sister women's colleges, the eminent
42
scholar and teacher of Greek, the great head master, the eloquent
and loyal alumna, and last, but not least, our world-renowned fel-
low citizen, Doctor Horace Howard Furness, that your generous
recognition of Bryn Mawr's achievement will give us fresh courage
to endeavor to approach our scholarly ideals more nearly in the next
twenty-five years.
As we stand to-day at the close of the first twenty-five years
of our college life, it may perhaps be profitable to ourselves and to
the many delegates and friends who have gathered here to do us
honor to consider the fortunate combination of circumstances that
has made Bryn Mawr what it is, for in the creation of a college like
Bryn Mawr fortunate coincidence and timely happening must
be added to the wisest forethought and planning.
The college was fortunate in its naming. Its Founder, Doctor
Joseph W. Taylor, a modest Quaker gentleman, desired that his
name should not be given to the college he had founded, and in
consequence the college received the charming name of Bryn Mawr
from the place in which it is situated.
Our Founder not only made in business the fortune with which
he endowed the college, but he also studied and in early life prac-
ticed medicine and it was with a physician's keen eye that he ex-
amined every spot within a radius of fifty miles from Philadelphia
for a healthful college site free from malaria, with pure water, in
the midst of wide stretches of fertile country. So much was de-
sign; but it is a fairy gift of fortune that the immediate neigh-
hood of the college has since become one of the most beautiful sub-
urbs of any great city, with well-kept private lawns and well-made
roads stretching out in every direction as if designed for the conve-
nience and safety of girl students. Thirty years ago it was not so
well understood as it is to-day that a situation like Bryn Mawr's
is the ideal situation for a great college, whether for men or women
—not in the city itself, which then distracts its students, not so far
away in the country that they are confined wholly to college inter-
ests, but near enough and not too near (just twenty minutes by
express trains) to a great city so that they may be citizens at once
of the real and the academic world. It was also a happy accident
that Doctor Taylor placed the college in the suburbs of the third
largest city in the United States and almost as near to New York
City as Vassar College itself so that its professors and students
43
may have ready access to libraries, museums, picture exhibitions,
good music and good acting, and also in the great commonwealth of
Pennsylvania where there was and is no other woman's college,
where the coming together of the great arteries of the Pennsylvania
railroad makes the college easily accessible from the east and west
and north and south. It has consequently become a cosmopolitan,
not a local, college where students come together from all parts
of the country to rub off their provincialisms and educate one an-
other into wide sympathies and broad points of view. Statistics
taken year after year show that a much smaller proportion of Bryn
Mawr's undergraduates come from its home state than those of
any of the great undergraduate colleges represented on this plat-
form.
It showed, I believe, great wisdom in our Founder not to have
allowed himself to be persuaded by President Gilman to organize
his new college for women as an annex to Johns Hopkins Univer-
sity. In the one long talk I had with him when I was a Cornell
senior in Baltimore for my vacation I thought that he was seriously
considering it. He questioned me about my experience of coeduca-
tion at Cornell and my truthful answers in regard to the rudeness
of the men students to women in those early days seemed greatly
to displease his gentle courtesy. He then asked me whether I
thought that women professors would be as apt to wish to teach in
an annex or a coeducational college as in a separate woman's
college. Even then I had astuteness enough to reply that they
would probably not be asked to teach at all except in a woman's
college as all the best positions would be reserved for men. I
remember well that this seemed to him very undesirable. He said
that he thought that young women should not be taught exclu-
sively by men but should also study under women of high attain-
ments holding important and responsible positions. I have never
forgotten the impression made on me by his earnest desire to give
the girls who should be students in his college the best possible
conditions. His personality was very vivid and very lovable.
He seemed to me to be the best type of a gentleman of the old
School. His manners had the courtesy and regard for others that
have come to seem oldfashioned. It can be only the highest type
of man that devotes himself and his fortune to the special interests
of women.
44
It was, I think, a happy thing that Bryn Mawr was founded as
an independent woman's college because whatever may be the ulti-
mate form to be taken by women's education in the future, I
believe that in the present women's education and women's devel-
opment may best be studied and promoted in a woman's college.
Bryn Mawr has been able to do more for women's scholarship and
women's problems as a separate college than even as an annex to
Johns Hopkins University.
In the dormitory system adopted Bryn Mawr was also very for-
tunate. Intelligent forethought here combined with happy chance.
In 1880, it was not clearly understood that lecture rooms and stu-
dents’ living rooms should be in separate buildings, nor was it then
fully recognized that young men or women should not be gathered
together in great numbers under one roof. Indeed at that time all
residence colleges except one consisted of one or more huge build-
ings, but this one, Smith College, was visited by Doctor Taylor and
his trustees and by a happy chance Doctor Taylor lost his heart to
the Smith College administration building and as a consequence
was strengthened in his decision to adopt the Smith rather than the
Vassar or Wellesley plan of building. The interior plan of Taylor
Hall is a careful copy of Smith's central building as it was before
it was enlarged, even to the chairs used in the assembly room and
class rooms. At present it would be impossible to plan a college
otherwise than after the Smith-Bryn Mawr plan of separate build-
1ngS.
Bryn Mawr was blessed by another bit of sheerest good luck.
Our Founder like many old bachelors and old maids who know
little about them glorified domestic duties. It was early deter-
mined by him that the future Bryn Mawr students should make
their beds and wash their dishes like the Wellesley students of
that day. The first President of our Board of Trustees who
accompanied him on a journey to Wellesley to see how domestic
service worked has often told me of the shock given Doctor Tay-
lor by the Wellesley china nicked by the turbulent washing of
college girls impatient to get to their studies or their sports, and
his subsequent decision to leave his trustees uninstructed in re-
spect to domestic science. Bryn Mawr has always held that unless
such service, as at Mount Holyoke, is given by the students to
secure a substantial reduction in the cost of their college course
45
it is wholly unjustifiable, as it gives them no training at all com-
mensurate with the loss of time valuable for study, and it cannot
take the place of fresh air or sports or gymnastic exercises. It is
a matter of principle with us to have everything possible done for
our students. We make their beds and clean, dust and put their
rooms in order each morning. For these four precious years we
give them the same freedom from domestic cares that is given to
young men in college who also may have to stoke their own fur-
naces later, or take up manual occupations.
In the placing of her first buildings, too, Bryn Mawr was fortu-
nate. Merion Hall, our first dormitory, was put close to an outside
road by chance almost, certainly with no thought of introducing a
new principle in college building. The convenience proved so
great that our other halls of residence also were placed on outside
roads, so that supply and delivery people on foot or in wagons need
never cross the campus which is reserved for professors and students
and their guests. Bryn Mawr was the first, I believe, of all Ameri-
can colleges to recognize what Oxford and Cambridge have exem-
plified, that space is economized and stateliness ensured by erect-
ing piles of massive buildings around the outside boundaries
of a college property and that gardens, lawns and quadrangles
walled in, as it were, by such buildings gain greatly in intimacy
and beauty. The gateway tower of Pembroke was, I believe, the
first collegiate entrance gateway to be built in the United States.
On any festival or college function like to-day's we are able to
close our entrances and exclude from our campus of fifty acres all
carriages and motors and uninvited guests. This plan of building
has since been adopted by most modern colleges.
The college was also fortunate in its architects. The archi-
tectural careers of Walter Cope and John Stewardson began with
the beginning of the college. A year after its opening, in 1886, these
two young architects were asked to plan Radnor Hall which became
their first important building. In Denbigh Hall designed in 1889
and 1890 they developed more completely the new style of colle-
giate architecture that has already done so much to beautify the
colleges of the United States. Although the so-called American
Collegiate Gothic was created in Denbigh, the long, low lines of
Pembroke extending 475 feet show its capabilities better. Rocke-
feller Hall and the new library, modelled after Wadham Hall at
46
Oxford built in 1630, were designed just before Mr. Cope's death,
in 1902, and developed the new style still further. It was after
Pembroke was built and because of its great beauty that Cope
and Stewardson were asked to imitate it in Blair Hall, Stafford
Little Hall, and other buildings at Princeton, in the dormitories
and Collegiate Gothic quadrangles of the University of Pennsyl-
vania, in the ten great buildings of Washington University, the six
great buildings of the University of Missouri, and in many other
places. It may perhaps be of interest to this college gathering to
know that the first Collegiate Gothic building of the University of
Chicago was designed by an architect sent to study our Bryn Mawr
buildings by its donor, Mrs. Charles Hitchcock, who had spent a
summer at Bryn Mawr and learned to love our college architecture.
Radnor, Denbigh, and Pembroke were standing in all their beauty
on the Bryn Mawr College campus before Cope and Stewardson had
been asked to plan any buildings for the universities of Princeton
and Pennsylvania and may thus be regarded as the models of all
the later collegiate buildings designed by them or by others in the
same style. A comparison of these later buildings themselves
with the Bryn Mawr College buildings, together with a compari-
son of their respective dates of conception and construction, will
readily establish the fact that the three earliest residence halls
of the Bryn Mawr group antedate all other American buildings
in this style and perhaps surpass them all in romantic beauty.
The so-called American Collegiate Gothic was thus created for
Bryn Mawr College by the genius of John Stewardson and Walter
Cope. The College first discovered their genius and directed it to
the collegiate Gothic style of the English colleges by asking them
to create here counterparts of the Oxford and Cambridge buildings.
Growing out of the soft English turf like the old English colleges
they copy, these seventeenth century Jacobean buildings give
a sense of quiet and peace peculiarly adapted to the life of college
students. If you will compare the photographs of our Bryn Mawr
College buildings with the Oxford and Cambridge buildings you
will be able easily to satisfy yourself that the Bryn Mawr Gothic is
not a copy of any Oxford or Cambridge college or group of colleges.
It is rather the spirit of their architecture reproduced in new form
by a wonderfully sympathetic understanding of changed archi-
tectural conditions. Our Bryn Mawr College buildings seem to me
47
more truly original in their adaptation of Jacobean Gothic, pos-
sessed of more romance and charm, and far more sympathetic
and satisfactory in their architectural effect than any of the
many college buildings erected in England after Jacobean models
since the latter half of the seventeenth century. We venture to
believe that the American Collegiate Gothic is a distinct con-
tribution made by Bryn Mawr's architects to the beauty of
American colleges.
I have been asked to speak of the methods by which Bryn Mawr's
harmonious effects have been secured. It is needless to say that
these effects have been attained by much travail of spirit, and that
they represent also a continuous artistic development. All our
college buildings except our new gymnasium were built or designed
under a single chairman of the building committee, David Scull,
who loved beauty and believed in following expert opinion. There
have been, therefore, no compromises and no second bests. Every-
thing belonging to experts has been left to experts. Our architects
and landscape gardeners in conjunction with the president of the
college have located, designed, built, and decorated our buildings
and placed our trees, shrubs, roads, and paths. Nothing has been
left to chance. The artistically uneven way in which the stones
are built into the walls of our college buildings reproduces the
long stretch of Pembroke wall laid by John Stewardson with
his own hands which was photographed and copied by the stone
masons in all our later buildings. The twenty-eight gargoyles of the
library cloisters are adapted from photographs and casts of gar-
goyles collected in many summers of travel, just as the dimen-
sions of the library cloisters and the size and number of the
cloister arches are based on the photographs and measurements of
many other cloisters studied during four summers in England,
France, and Italy. The staircases of Pembroke, Rockefeller, and
the Library are simplified and modelled from famous Jacobean
staircases in England. The color of the Pembroke dining room
and corridors was mixed by Walter Cope with my lay assistance
during one long August day of terrific heat. Since Mr. Cope's
death Mr. Lockwood de Forest has himself designed all our decora-
tion and mixed, or supervised the mixing of, all our colors from
the beautiful Gothic ceiling of the library reading room which
he designed after Gothic models to the window trims of the build-
48
ings and the stains on the panelling, front doors, and floors. He
has designed our cloister garden fountain, our library reading
lamps, our lamp-posts, our library clock, our book-plates, our
memorial tablets, and all our decorative gifts. By a beneficent
ruling of our governing board every gift of an architectural or
decorative character must be designed by the college architect
under the direction of our building committee. Much of the fur-
niture of our halls of residence has been purchased in old furniture
shops in England and in different parts of America, or adapted
like the dining room chairs of Denbigh, Pembroke, and Rocke-
feller or the reading desks and tables of the library from English
furniture of the Jacobean period. From the opening of the college
our rugs, furniture, furniture coverings, pictures and other orna-
ments have been purchased and placed in position by two persons
only, and the same two persons, which secures a unity of effect
to be attained in no other way especially when as at Bryn Mawr
rigid economy must be practised. A great part of our success in
creating here a beautiful and harmonious college is surely due to
the wise policy of our directors in entrusting the artistic develop-
ment of the college to the same hands, but it was good fortune
beyond the scope of any provision however wise to be able to
secure at the critical moment the services of such architects as
John Stewardson and Walter Cope and of such a decorator and
architect as their successor Lockwood de Forest. It was also
the happiest coincidence that the chairman of the building com-
mittee, the member of the governing board most closely associated
with the artistic side of the college, and the president herself
should have been fitted by residence and travel abroad to coöperate
with the architects and by appreciation and criticism encourage
them to put forth their highest artistic efforts.
We have come to believe that the power of a college to influence
its students for good is vastly increased if it gathers them together
for four impressionable years in the midst of beautiful surroundings
in buildings built and furnished in accordance with the best archi-
tectural and decorative traditions and administered in accordance
with the civilized traditions of well-bred households. We believe
that the Bryn Mawr campus and the Bryn Mawr halls will not
only be loved and dreamed of because of their beauty by successive
generations of Bryn Mawr students, but that the principles of
4 49
good taste embodied here will be introduced into hundreds of
Bryn Mawr homes. Although it does not appear in our curriculum
of study, this is Bryn Mawr's not unimportant contribution to
domestic science.
Again it was due to the same happy combination of accident and
design that the system of students' self-government which is now
being introduced into all colleges for women originated at Bryn
Mawr and still exists here in a fuller and more unrestricted form
than is even now known elsewhere. There has never been faculty
discipline at Bryn Mawr. When the college opened it was so mani-
festly unsuitable to entrust to a faculty of young unmarried men—
a condition, I may say, that has long since remedied itself—the
conduct of a body of women students of marriageable age that
their discipline fell naturally into the hands of one of the three
women on the faculty, the then Dean. By me it was given to
the students themselves, informally at the opening of the college
in 1886, formally by charter with the approval of the president and
trustees in 1892—never hereafter, I trust, to be taken away. And
so our great Bryn Mawr Self-Government was born of the tem-
porary and wholly fortuitous coming together of marriageable
men and maidens as professors and students.
In the naming of the college, then, its natural environment, its
system of buildings, its architecture, and the discipline of its stu-
dent body we have nothing to wish changed. Wise provision has
been everywhere supplemented by the happiest of favoring cir-
cumstances. But when we turn from the material to the intellec-
tual side of our college life it becomes more difficult to separate
design from accident. It must, for example, be regarded as the
wisest forethought that two trustees of Johns Hopkins University,
then as now in the van of education in the United States, were
appointed by our Founder as trustees of Bryn Mawr and one of
them made president of its board, and that other trustees appointed
by him had had wide legislative experience as trustees of Brown,
Lehigh, Wassar, and Haverford colleges, the Penn Charter School,
and other educational and charitable institutions. In consequence
the government of the college has been from the first admirable.
Nothing done has had to be undone; there have been no com-
promises between present expediency and ultimate good; the
course of the college has been unswervingly onward. The early
50
trustees, and later the directors of the college, have with almost
unexampled wisdom confined themselves strictly to their legisla-
tive and financial functions. I do not remember a measure strongly
advocated by the faculty or a nomination or measure advocated
by the first or second president of the college that has not received
the ultimate approval of our board of government. Not only our
artistic development but our academic and intellectual develop-
ment has been continuous. Indeed Bryn Mawr is one of the few
colleges in the United States which has been allowed to try the
effect of continuity. Since its opening in 1885 our entrance require-
ments, our group system, and our oral examinations in French
and German for seniors have remained practically unchanged.
In looking back over twenty-five years we can perceive good
fortune ever in close attendance on the best forethought of our
Directors and Faculty, adding success higher than we could have
hoped for.
For example those of us who organized the first Bryn Mawr cur-
riculum in 1884 and hesitated between the fixed course of required
studies in operation in almost all colleges and the new free elective
system, then coming to its own at Harvard and enthusiastically
heralded, could not have foreseen that the system of study that
Bryn Mawr finally adapted from the three years' undergraduate
course of Johns Hopkins University, amplified into a four years'
course and named the Group System, a name approved of and used
by President Gilman at the opening of the college twenty-five
years ago, would be adopted later by the most progressive col-
leges, among them the state universities of Indiana, Illinois, Mis-
souri, Wisconsin, California, and Kansas and Northwestern
University; the private foundations of Chicago, Leland Stan-
ford Jr., Williams, Dartmouth, Tufts, New York University,
Pennsylvania, Princeton, Clark College, Yale, and within a year
Harvard, and the four women's colleges of Smith, Wellesley,
Mount Holyoke, and Goucher.
The Group System as worked out in 1884 and operated for the
past twenty-five years at Bryn Mawr is simply this. As all edu-
cation must be a series of choices excluding some studies to make
room for others and as some one must make the choice, Bryn Mawr
says that the college with all the experience and knowledge at its
command, rather than the ignorant girl or boy, shall choose what
51
shall be the studies that must be included in all liberal culture.
Bryn Mawr says that one-half of a student's time must be given
to certain disciplinary culture studies, which are two years of five
hours a week of English, one year of philosophy, one year of
Greek or Latin, two years of science with certain substitutes
allowed for the second year of science. Bryn Mawr does not
ignore the delight, than which there is no greater, of working
where one's bent leads, and it allows each student to spend one-
half her time in the studies she prefers. The College, however,
says to her: “Whatever you care for you must study long enough
to have some knowledge of and you must also study something
else allied to your favorite study long enough to have some
knowledge of it too so that through these two allied studies you
may get at least a far-off vision of scholarship.” This is the Bryn
Mawr Group System. So far are our students from finding their
group burdensome that the great majority of them choose to spend
the rest of their purely elective work, for one-sixth of the college
course is purely elective, in advanced work in their group studies
or in their required studies.
Bryn Mawr has from the first taken decided ground in regard to
the necessity of residence for both graduate and undergraduate
students. We do not admit more students than we can house in
our halls of residence. We believe that the influence of a college is
doubled if its students can devote themselves to study in beautiful
surroundings free for perhaps the only time in life from all respon-
sibility for the domestic running of the household and from all
those hundred little duties that make up the daily life of the rest
of us. More important than all Bryn Mawr educates its students
for four years in communities made up of older and younger stu-
dents, in little republics of letters, so to speak, where there is a
fair field for all and favor for none. In each of our halls of resi-
dence one-fifth of the rooms are reserved for graduate students and
one-fifth for each of the four undergraduate classes. By living
thus together, older and younger students in the same halls of
residence, we think that our students are educated by each other
and learn as they can in no other way to live and work with their
fellows.
The four years' college course has been strictly enforced. Bryn
Mawr holds that four years out of a lifetime are not too much to
52
give to liberal training and culture. When other colleges urge lack
of time and the haste of parents to set their children to work or to
settle them in life Bryn Mawr replies that she is concerned not so
much with the first five years after leaving college as with the ulti-
mate goal, that all experience shows that in the long run the
broadly-trained intellect wins in the race even when measured by
dollars and cents, and that even if the credit balance of dollars and
cents were not, as it is, on the right side, a wider intellectual out-
look, more varied interests and greater joy in living ought not to be
sacrificed, above all for women who are not yet in the market-place.
It showed wisdom and forethought in the highest degree for our
Board of Directors to select as the first president of the college the
man they did, but again happy fortune coöperated with the college.
They could not have known—no one could have known—that his
unswerving nature would set itself immovably towards the highest
standards of academic excellence as soon as he recognized them. He
was consumed with the flame of a great love for the best as he knew
it. No anniversary of the college can be true to facts or in any way
complete without the fullest recognition of his great part in the
early development of the college. For the first ten years, from
1884, the year before the college opened, until his resignation of the
presidency in 1894, we worked together in the closest daily compan-
ionship and agreement. There was over thirty years’ difference
in our ages, yet so great was his determination that the college
should have the best that whenever he thought that my more
recent training made me better able to judge of any academic
matter he placed it unreservedly in my hands and supported my
conclusions, which indeed became his own, with unflinching
loyalty. When, as often, he knew better than I, I tried to follow
his wonderful example. It is not to be wondered at that the early
Bryn Mawr was well organized and well administered. No one
could withstand such a combination as we made of youthful
enthusiasm and mature wisdom. Our late beloved President,
James E. Rhoads, was one of the broadest men I ever knew. The
absolute academic and moral freedom, the freedom to thinkstraight
and to act in accordance with individual conscience and honest
conviction which has won for Bryn Mawr the love and confidence
of her faculty and students, is due in great part to President
Rhoads' catholic and truly liberal spirit.
58
It was again the happiest of all coincidences that the young Cor-
nell student destined to return from Germany four years later to
be the dean of the new college for women should have come into
close contact in her father's house with that wonderful group of
professors, to one of whom we have listened to-day, and of students,
now the leading professors in America, who together were the early
Johns Hopkins. Every college in the United States was to be
transformed by the great impetus it was to give to scholarship
and research. It is still, in my opinion, the foremost exemplar of
of those early ideals. Bryn Mawr's debt to Johns Hopkins is too
great to be put into words. We owe it not only our group system,
but our whole conception of what graduate and undergraduate
work should be and our ideals of research and scientific thorough-
ness. A long succession of Hopkins men have taught and are
still teaching in our Bryn Mawr faculty. In my contact with the
great scholars and teachers of Johns Hopkins and Leipzig I learned
what every fact in my administrative experience has proved to
me over and over again, that a man or women actively engaged
in research makes the best teacher for freshmen as well as for
graduates. I believe that a great teacher can be produced in no
other way. All research workers are not good teachers, nor are all
professors who are ignorant of research good teachers; but given a
great scholar with the power to teach, then, and then only, we
have a great teacher.
I regard it as another happy result of this early contact with
Johns Hopkins that Bryn Mawr opened with a large number of
resident fellowships, the first ever given to women, and with a
graduate school. A college without graduates working with and
under our professors never occurred to us. Without this graduate
school, which has now become the largest for women east of
Chicago except Columbia and the fourth largest in the United
States, we could not possibly have drawn to Bryn Mawr the eminent
teachers of our faculty. We believe that even the best under-
graduate teaching cannot be given by a college whose professors
do not conduct research and investigation courses and that such
professors would make infinitely better teachers even for children
in a primary school if they were attainable. One-third of the
time of every member of the Bryn Mawr faculty has always
been given to graduate teaching.
54
I have left to the last the Bryn Mawr Faculty, the most striking
instance of Bryn Mawr's building better than she knew. Gathered
from all parts of the United States and from many foreign coun-
tries, with a single eye to the best available men and women for
the subject to be taught, the reputation of the Bryn Mawr faculty
for scholarship and teaching has waxed ever greater until now it
takes rank with those of the five or six foremost universities in
the United States whose endowment is many times greater than
Bryn Mawr's. Bryn Mawr is sometimes called the nursing
mother for professorships in other colleges, but it is proof of her
attaching power that it has invariably required a salary much
larger than Bryn Mawr can pay to draw away professors who have
made their reputations here. But Bryn Mawr has her abundant
reward even from those professors whom she loses for she has them
in the glory of their youth when a teacher is at his very best.
There are, I think, various reasons for the large number of eminent
scholars and teachers produced at Bryn Mawr. No executive or
administrative work has ever been asked of our professors. They
are relieved from all work that can be done by secretaries and by
the deans who are purely executive officers and, I may perhaps
add, by the president of the college. There is no disciplinary
work, no department work, little committee work, few faculty
meetings. Each member of the faculty agrees before appoint-
ment to accept no engagement to teach, coach, or give more than
one lecture elsewhere during the college year without the consent
of the governing board, which consent is always refused. There
is complete autonomy of teaching. No member of the faculty
works for any other member or is under his or her control as to
courses to be given or methods of teaching. There is no depart-
mental system. Each member of the faculty has always given at
least one-third of his or her hours of teaching to seminary work
in the graduate school. Great stress is laid on research work,
publication and success in seminary teaching in promotions. Non-
productive scholars are thus weeded out. Also no one who fails
as a seminary teacher is advanced. No full professors are ever
called but all teachers are tested and only those who succeed in
both graduate and undergraduate work are promoted or retained.
In every other profession or business some men are expected to
fail. A large proportion of lawyers, physicians, and business men
55
do fail. Why should the red-hot Ph.D. called to a college to win
his spurs who fails to prove himself a good teacher have a vested
right to remain for life advancing from grade to grade by accumu-
lated years of unsuccessful teaching? At Bryn Mawr we think
it a crime committed against our students to retain such a man or
woman in the service of the college, and I believe that it is in
great part because we have not lacked courage to act on Our
opinion that the Bryn Mawr College faculty has become justly
renowned.
Every college is made up of its governing board, its faculty, its
students, its alumnae, and the outside friends and admirers drawn
to it by the sympathetic appeal made by its educational work. At
any given time a college is judged by its faculty, its students, and
above all by its alumnae who are in a sense its finished product and
the reason for its existence. All these reflect glory on the college
and in return receive in some measure glory from the reputation
and fame of the college. The trustees are sometimes forgotten.
It is because of this that the work of a governing board of a college
like Bryn Mawr is peculiarly altruistic and self-sacrificing. On an
anniversary day like this the inestimable services and generous
sacrifices of our trustees and directors, their sound and progressive
financial administration, their liberal policy, and their high stand-
ards of legislation and deliberation should receive due and grateful
recognition from all lovers of Bryn Mawr and most of all from the
alumnae and faculty of the college.
Our students present and past and our alumnae are too much part
of ourselves for us to praise them. This we must leave to others.
They are to a great extent what the faculty and the college have
made them. They are our spiritual and intellectual handiwork.
Perhaps on an occasion like this, however, I may be permitted to
say from a personal acquaintance of twenty-five years with two
thousand seven hundred and twenty-four Bryn Mawr students
that I have found them a gallant and loyal company, ardent in
study, responsive to every spiritual and moral appeal, able to
think straight, eager to face and correct abuses in their college
life, ready to sacrifice individual pleasure to the general good,
touched by the flame of an idealism that augurs well for their
work as citizens of the outside world.
In this historical discussion of the various influences and policies
56
that have combined to make Bryn Mawr what it is to-day I have
left out all of our many mistakes and failures. I beg you to believe
that I could speak as fully on Bryn Mawr's failures as on her suc-
cesses if the time and place offered. On this birthday of the college
we are saying only the pleasant things.
To the Founder of the college, to the alumnae and friends who
have rallied to the support of the college in her hour of need and
have crowned her work and enlarged her usefulness with gifts
amounting to nearly four millions of dollars no words can ade-
quately express our gratitude on this our twenty-fifth anniversary.
To the making of Bryn Mawr College then the very stars in
their courses seem to have worked together; from her cradle no
good genius, no fairy godmother has been absent. Beautiful
exceedingly, dowered with gifts of intellect and spirit, strong in
the love of her faculty and students past and present, with the
tradition of success behind her, the college stands at the beginning
of her second quarter-century. We commit her future to those
who love her, to the many friends who have gathered about her
in the dawning of her fame, to her foster children who have received
her best gifts of education. In endowing colleges and helping
them we are in a peculiar but very real sense continuing our own
existence beyond our own lives. If it is possible to build on
earth a heavenly house not made with hands, it is possible in the
creation and perfecting of a college such as this. An immortality of
remembrance and gratitude belongs to the past and awaits the
future directors, faculty, and benefactors of Bryn Mawr College.
SoNG BY THE STUDENTS: “THOU GRACIOUS INSPIRATION ?”
Thou gracious inspiration, our guiding star!
Mistress and Mother, all hail, Bryn Mawr,
Goddess of Wisdom, thy torch divine
Doth beacon thy votaries to thy shrine.
And we, thy daughters, would thy vestals be,
Thy torch to consecrate eternally.
57
LIST OF DELEGATES
Of Universities and Colleges in order of date at which their
Institutions admitted Women as Collegiate, Graduate, or
Professional Students, or taught them in Affiliated Colleges
WoMAN's MEDICAL CollBGE of PENNsyLVANIA, 1850
Clara Marshall, M.D., Dean
Alice Weld Tallant, M.D., Professor of Obstetrics
Ruth Webster Lathrop, M.D., Professor of Physiology
Adelaide Ward Peckham, M.D., Professor of Bacteriology
Henry Morris, M.D., Professor of Anatomy
Frederick P. Henry, M.D., Professor of Principles and Practice of Medi-
cine and Clinical Medicine
LAwRENCE College, 1853
Caroline Elizabeth De Greene, Ph.B., A.M., Dean of Women
BAKER UNIVERSITY, 1858
Lemuel Herbert Murlin, D.D., S.T.D., President
EARLHAM CollBGE, 1859
Thomas Raeburn White, L.B., LL.D., Alumnus
WASSAR College, 1865
James Monroe Taylor, D.D., LL.D., President
Lucy M. Salmon, A.M., Professor of History, Sometime Fellow of Bryn
Mawr College
Aaron L. Treadwell, Ph.D., Professor of Biology
Clark W. Chamberlain, Ph.D., Professor of Physics
Margaret Floy Washburn, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology
WASHBURN College, 1865
Frank Knight Sanders, Ph.D., President
CARLETON CollBGE, 1867
Donald J. Cowling, Ph.D., D.D., President
HAMPTON NorMAL AND AGRICULTURAL INSTITUTE, 1868
Hollis B. Frissell, D.D., S.T.D., LL.D., Principal
UNIVERSITY of MINNESOTA, 1869
Cyrus Northrop, LL.D., President
Swart'HMORE College, 1869
George A. Hoadley, Ph.D., Vice-President and Professor of Physics
John A. Miller, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics and Astronomy
William Isaac Hull, Ph.D., Professor of History
Benjamin F. Battin, Ph.D., Professor of German
Gellert Alleman, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry
Walter Dennison, Ph.D., Professor of Greek and Latin
WILSON College, FoR WomEN, 1870
Caroline Goad, M.A., Dean
UNIVERSITY of CALIFoRNIA, 1870
Theodore de Leo de Laguna, Ph.D., Alumnus, Professor of Philosophy in
Bryn Mawr College
UNIVERSITY of MICHIGAN, 1870
Charles Leander Doolittle, Ph.D., Professor of Astronomy and Director of
the Flower Observatory in the University of Pennsylvania
58
UNIVERSITY of Missouri, 1870
Mary Bidwell Breed, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Adviser of
Women and Professor of Chemistry
Eula Adaline Weeks, A.M., Alumna, Sometime Fellow of Bryn Mawr College
PENNSLYvANIA STATE College, 1871
Edwin Erle Sparks, Ph.D., LL.D., President
Sara Cutts Lovejoy, B.A., Dean of Women
UNIVERSITY of Wisconsin, 1871
Emory Richard Johnson, Ph.D., Professor of Transportation and Commerce
- in the University of Pennsylvania
CoRNELL UNIVERSITY, 1872
Thomas Frederick Crane, A.M., Litt.D., Professor Emeritus of Romance
Languages and Literature
Elizabeth B. Coville, Ph.B., Alumna
Emily W. Berry Howland, Ph.B., Alumna
Knox College, 1872
Grace A. Stayt, Ph.B., Dean of Women
WESLEYAN. UNIVERSITY, 1872
William Arnold Shanklin, L.H.D., LL.D., President
Raymond Dodge, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology
WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, 1873
Charles Sumner Howe, Ph.D., Alumnus and President of Case School of
Applied Science of Western Reserve University
Charles Clarence Williamson, Ph.D., Alumnus, Associate in Economics and
Politics in Bryn Mawr College
PURDUE UNIVERSITY, 1874
Charles E. Wanderkleed, Ph.B., Sc.B., A.C., Pharm.D., Alumnus
UNIVERSITY of CINCINNAT1, 1874 -
Emilie Watts McVea, A.M., Dean of Women and Assistant Professor of
English
SMITH College, 1875
L. Clark Seelye, LL.D., President Emeritus
Marion LeRoy Burton, Ph.D., D.D., President
Elizabeth Kemper Adams, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Philosophy and
Education
Caroline Brown Bourland, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Professor of Spanish
and French
WELLESLEY College, 1875
Caroline Hazard, Litt.D., LL.D., President of Wellesley College 1899-1910
Ellen Fitz Pendleton, A.M., Dean and Professor of Mathematics
Charlotte F. Roberts, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry
Agnes F. Perkins, A.B., A.M., Bryn Mawr College, Instructor in Rhetoric
and Composition
JUNIATA CollBGE, 1876
I. Harvey Brumbaugh, A.M., Acting President
Charles Calvert Ellis, Ph.D., Dean of the School of Education and Professor
of Philosophy and Pedagogy
OHIo WESLEYAN. UNIVERSITY, 1877
Cyrus Brooks Austin, M.A., D.D., Dean of Women and Professor of Math-
ematics and Astronomy
59
HARVARD UNIVERSITY AND RADCLIFFE Colle:GE roR Women, 1879
Abbott Lawrence Lowell, LL.D., President of Harvard University
Mary Coes, A.M., Dean of Radcliffe College
Edith Mendall Taylor, A.B., Alumna of Radcliffe College, Sometime Reader
in English in Bryn Mawr College
URSINUs College, 1881
A. Edwin Keigwin, D.D., President
George Leslie Omwake, Ph.D., Vice-President
CoE College, 1882
Samuel Black McCormick, D.D., LL.D., Former President
MASSACHUSETTS INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY, 1883
Richard Cockburn Maclaurin, M.A., LL.D., Sc.D., President
Ellen H. Richards, A.M., S.B., Sc.D., Instructor in Sanitary Chemistry
McGILL UNIVERSITY AND Roy AL VICTORIA College, FoR Women, 1883
Susan E. Cameron, A.M., Vice-Warden of Royal Victoria College for Women
BUCKNELL UNIVERSITY, 1884
John Howard Harris, LL.D., President
DICKINSON College, 1884
James Henry Morgan, Ph.D., Dean and Professor of Greek Language and
Literature
NEw York UNIVERSITY, 1886
Clarence D. Ashley, J.D., LL.D., Dean of the School of Law, Sometime
Lecturer in Law in Bryn Mawr College
MoUNT Holyoke, CoLLEGE, 1888
Mary E. Woolley, A.M., Litt.D., L.H.D., President
Nellie Neilson, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Professor of History
Ellen Deborah Ellis, A.B., A.M., Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Associate Pro-
fessor of History
Elizabeth R. Laird, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Professor of Physics
Emilie Norton Martin, A.B., Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Instructor in Math-
ematics
GouchER College, 1888
Eugene A. Noble, L.H.D., President
John B. Wan Meter, D.D., Dean and Professor of Psychology
Eleanor Louisa Lord, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Professor of History
Lila Verplanck North, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Professor of Greek
Charles C. Blackshear, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry, Sometime Instructor
in Chemistry in Bryn Mawr College
Lilian Welsh, M.D., Professor of Physiology and Hygiene
MIAMI UNIVERSITY, 1888
Raymond Mollyneaux Hughes, Sc.M., Dean of the College of Liberal Arts
TEACHERS College of Columbia UNIVERSITY, 1888
Gonzalez Lodge, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Latin and Greek, Sometime
Professor of Latin in Bryn Mawr College
Julius Sachs, Ph.D., Professor of Secondary Education
TEMPLE UNIVERSITY, 1888
Russell H. Conwell, LL.D., D.D., President
Laura H. Carnell, A.B., Litt.D., Dean
CoLUMBIA UNIVERSITY AND BARNARD College, FoR WomEN, 1889
William Tenney Brewster, A.M., Provost and Acting Dean of Barnard College
60
J. McKeen Cattell, Ph.D., Professor of Psychology, Sometime Non-Resident
Lecturer in Psychology in Bryn Mawr College
Edmund Beecher Wilson, Ph.D., Sc.D., LL.D., M.D., Professor of Zoëlogy,
Sometime Professor of Biology in Bryn Mawr College
Marie Reimer, Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Assistant Professor of Chemistry
in Barnard College
Ida Helen Ogilvie, A.B., Ph.D., Bryn Mawr College, Assistant in Geology
in Barnard College
PENNSYLVANIA College, 1890
Louis A. Parsons, Ph.D., Professor of Physics
UNIVERSITY of CHICAGo, 1892 -
Paul Shorey, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor and Head of the Department of Greek,
Sometime Professor of Greek in Bryn Mawr College
DRExEL INSTITUTE of ART, SCIENCE, AND INDUSTRY, Philadelphia, 1892
James MacAlister, A.M., LL.D., President
Harriet L. Mason, B.S., A.M., Professor of English Language and Literature
UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA, 1892
George Egbert Fisher, A.M., Ph.D., Dean of the College
Herman Wandenburg Ames, A.M., Ph.D., Dean of the Graduate School
Allen John Smith, A.M., M.D., Dean of the School of Medicine
Edward Cameron Kirk, D.D.S., Sc.D., Dean of the School of Dentistry
TUFTs College AND Jackson College For Women, 1892
Caroline S. Davies, A.B., Dean of Jackson College for Women
YALE UNIVERSITY, 1892 -
Edward Washburn Hopkins, Ph.D., LL.D., Professor of Sanskrit and Com-
parative Philology, Sometime Professor of Sanskrit and Greek in Bryn
Mawr College
RANDoLPH-MAcon Woman's College, 1893
Fernando Wood Martin, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry
JoBNs HoPKINS UNIVERSITY, 1893
Ira Remsen, M.D., Ph.D., LL.D., D.C.L., President
Hermann Collitz, Ph.D., Professor of Germanic Philology, Sometime Pro-
fessor of Teutonic Philology in Bryn Mawr College
Henry M. Thomas, M.D., Clinical Professor of Neurology
Florence R. Sabin, M.D., Sc.D., Associate Professor of Anatomy
MILWAUKEE-Down ER CollBGE, 1895
Ellen C. Sabin, A.M., President
UNIVERSITY of PITTSBURGH, 1895
Samuel Black McCormick, D.D., LL.D., Chancellor (also representing
Coe College)
S. B. Linhart, A.M., D.D., Secretary of the University
UNION THEoLogical SEMINARY, 1895
Francis Brown, Ph.D., D.D., Litt.D., LL.D., President of the Faculty and
Davenport Professor of Hebrew and Cognate Languages
Julius A. Bewer, Ph.D., Professor of Hebrew and Old Testament Interpre-
tation -
ADELPHI College, 1896
Margaret Sweeney, Ph.D., Dean of Women and Assistant Professor of Eng-
lish Language and Literature
BRowN. UNIVERSITY AND THE WomEN's Colle:GE IN BROwn UNIVERSITY, 1897
William Herbert Perry Faunce, D.D., LL.D., President
61
Lida Shaw King, A.M., Dean of the Women's College, Sometime Fellow of
Bryn Mawr College
TRINITY CollegE, Durham, North Carolina, 1897
William Preston Few, Ph.D., President
LAKE ERIE Colle:GE, 1898
Vivian Blanche Small, A.M., President
THE School of PHILANTHROPY, 1898
Samuel McCune Lindsay, Ph.D., Director
SIMMON's College, 1899
Sarah Louise Arnold, A.M., Dean
Susan Myra Kingsbury, Ph.D., Assistant Professor of History and Economics
Evelyn Walker A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Registrar, Sometime Secretary of
Bryn Mawr College
UNIVERSITY of RocBESTER, 1900
Rush Rhees, D.D., LL.D., President
RockFFELLER INSTITUTE for MEDICAL RESEARCH, 1901
Simon Flexner, M.D., Sc.D., Director of the Institute
Jacques Loeb, Ph.D., Sometime Associate in Physiology in Bryn Mawr
College
CIARK UNIVERSITY, 1902
Edmund Clark Sanford, Ph.D., Sc.D., President of Clark College
HobART College AND WILLIAM SMITH College For Women, 1908
Milton Haight Turk, Ph.D., Dean of William Smith College and Professor
of English in Hobart and William Smith Colleges
Colleges not open to Women
(In order of foundation)
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY, 1746
Henry Burchard Fine, Ph.D., Dean of the Faculty and Dod Professor of
Mathematics
RUTGERs Colle:GE, 1766
William Henry Steele Demarest, D.D., L.L.D., President
ST. JoHNs College, 1789 -
Thomas Fell, Ph.D., LL.D., D.C.L., President
WILLIAMs Colle:GE, 1793
Frederick Carlos Ferry, Ph.D., Sc.D., Dean of the College and Professor of
Mathematics
UNION Colle:GE, 1795
Morton M. Price, B.E., Alumnus
CoLGATE UNIVERSITY, 1819
Melbourne Stuart Read, Ph.D., Professor of Philosophy and Pedagogy
AMHERST Colle:GE, 1821
Talcott Williams, L.H.D., LL.D., Trustee
TRINITY College, Hartford, Connecticut, 1824
Frank Cole Babbitt, Ph.D., Professor of Greek
JEFFERson MEDICAL College, 1825
James W. Holland, M.D., Dean
Albert P. Brubaker, M.D., Professor of Physiology
UNIvERSITY or VIRGIN1A, 1825
The Reverend J. Thompson Cole, President of the Alumni Association of
the University 62
WESTERN THEOLOGICAL SEMINARY, 1827
W. H. Oxtoby, D.D., Member of the Board of Trustees
LAPAYETTE College, 1832
Ethelbert Dudley Warfield, D.D., LL.D., President
James Waddell Tupper, Ph.D., Professor of English Literature, Sometime
Associate in English Literature in Bryn Mawr College
HAVERFoRD College, 1833
Isaac Sharpless, Sc.D., LL.D., L.H.D., President
Allen Clapp Thomas, A.M., Librarian and Professor of History
Don Carlos Barrett, Ph.D., Professor of Economics
Legh Wilber Reid, Ph.D., Professor of Mathematics
James Addison Babbitt, A.M., M.D., Physical Director and Associate Pro-
fessor of Physical Science
Albert Elmer Hancock, Ph.D., Professor of English
WILLA Nova College, 1842
Edward G. Dohan, O.S.A., President
Bernard J. O'Donnell, M.A., Vice-President
GIRARD CollBGE, 1848
Winthrop D. Sheldon, A.M., LL.D., Vice-President
CoLLEGE of THE CITY of NEw York, 1849
Herbert R. Moody, Ph.D., Associate Professor of Chemistry
LEHIGH UNIVERSITY, 1866
Natt M. Emery, A.M., Vice-President
John L. Stewart, Ph.B., Professor of Economics and History
Robert W. Blake, A.M., Professor of Latin Language and Literature
Benjamin LeRoy Miller, Ph.D., Professor of Geology, Sometime Associate.
in Geology in Bryn Mawr College
CASE SCHOOL of APPLIED SCIENCE of WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY, 1881
Charles Sumner Howe, Ph.D., President
CLARK College, 1902
Edmund Clark Sanford, Ph.D., Sc.D., President
James Pertice Porter, Ph.D., Dean of the Faculty and Assistant Professor
of Psychology
Delegates from Learned Societies
THE AMERICAN PHILosophical SocIETY FOR PROMOTING USEFUL KNowLEDGE
Arthur Willis Goodspeed, Ph.D., Professor of Physics in the University of
Pennsylvania
AMERICAN ACADEMY of PoliticAL AND SOCIAL SCIENCE
Leo Stanton Rowe, Ph.D., LL.D., President, Professor of Political Science
in the University of Pennsylvania
Board of Directors of the Alumnae Association of Bryn Mawr
College
Susan Fowler, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, President
Sibyl Hubbard Darlington, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Vice-President
Jane Bowne Haines, A.B., A.M., Bryn Mawr College, Treasurer
Abigail Camp Dimon, A.B., A.M., Bryn Mawr College, Corresponding Sec-
retary
63
Delegates of Preparatory Schools
Delegates of ten Preparatory Schools, in alphabetical order, which have sent not
less than thirty pupils to Bryn Mawr College
THE AGNES IRwin School, OF PHILADELPHIA
Sophy Dallas Irwin, Principal
Susan Frances Wan Kirk, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of Latin and
English
Mary Harris, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of Mathematics
Pierre François Giroud, L.L., Teacher of French
THE BALDw1N SCHool, FoR GIRLs of BRYN MAwR
Jane Louise Brownell, A.B., A.M., Bryn Mawr College, Head of the School
Elizabeth Forrest Johnson, A.B., Associate Head of the School
Gertrude Young, Assistant to the Head of the School
Augusta Choate, A.M., Teacher of English
THE BREARLEY SCHOOL For GIRLs of NEw York CITY
James G. Croswell, A.M., Principal
Susan Fowler, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of Latin
Elsa Bowman, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of Mathematics and Science
Frances Arnold, Studied in Bryn Mawr College, 1893–95, Teacher of Mathe-
matics
THE BRYN MAwR ScHool, of BALTIMORE
Edith Hamilton, A.B., A.M., Bryn Mawr College, Head Mistress
Mary E. Hoyt, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of English
Florence Stevens Hoyt, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of English
Maria Worhees Bedinger, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of Mathematics
FRIENDS CENTRAL SCHOOL of PHILADELPHIA
William Elmer Barrett, S.B., Sc.M., Principal
PHILADELPHIA HIGH SCHOOL FOR GIRLs
J. Eugene Baker, Ph.D., Principal
Jessie E. Allen, A.B., Teacher of Latin and Greek
Emma N. Newitt, Teacher of English
Sarah P. Miller, Ph.D., Teacher of Chemistry
RosBMARY HALL SCHOOL of GREENWICH, CoNNECTICUT
Leila Roosevelt Stoughton, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of Mathe-
matics
THE MISSEs SHIPLEY's School of BRYN MAwe
Hannah Shipley, Principal
Elizabeth Shipley, Associate Principal e
Katharine Shipley, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Associate Principal
Helen J. Robins, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Instructor in English
Laura Fowler, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Adviser on Courses
Freda M. Simpson, Director of Gymnasium
THE WELTIN SCHool, FoR GIRLs of NEw York CITY
Louise Weltin, Principal
Isabella Dwight Spraguesmith, Principal
Marguerite Carriére, Teacher of French
Mary Delia Hopkins, A.B., A.M., Bryn Mawr College, Teacher of German
Katherine Campbell Reiley, Ph.D., Teacher of Greek and Latin
THE WINsor School of BosTon
Elizabeth Winsor Pearson, A.B., Bryn Mawr College, Vice-Principal
64
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