The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink

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СКАЧАТЬ ministers didn’t make much in those days,” she explained.

      With her zest for learning and her abiding interest in others, Dorothy wanted to discover why people behaved the way they did. In 1923, she enrolled at the University of Chicago for a year of graduate study in psychology. She left with her master’s degree and the realization that not even psychology can explain all the “whys” of the human race. She recalled, “I found that employers wanted firstly, a man with a PhD degree; secondly, a man with a master’s degree; thirdly, a woman with a doctoral degree, and very fourthly, a woman with a master’s degree. Having no money to continue my studies, I went to San Bernardino, California, as dean of girls and vice principal of the high school. I was working under my former principal of the ‘lemon’ quotation.”

      In California, Dorothy learned to love the outdoor life in a way that had never been possible before. She soaked in the desert, mountains, and seashore. She loved to look from her office window at Mount San Bernardino, gaining strength and serenity from the peaceful view.

      After several years at San Bernardino, Dorothy traveled to Teachers College of Columbia University to study student personnel administration. During her year at the university, she stayed in the International House with students from fifty-seven countries. Early in 1933, she received her PhD and returned to San Bernardino. That’s when President Elliott called.

      She came to Purdue not only as dean of women, but also as an associate professor of psychology. Her salary was $3,300 a year, about $100 more than she was paid in California.

      Even before Dorothy became dean of women, she had accomplished much in a time when few females attended college, worked outside the home, or made a respectable living. Yet for Dorothy, still in her mid-thirties, the best was yet to come. Her life would be filled with accomplishments that inspired other women.

      When Dorothy and her parents arrived at Purdue, they were lodged at the Fowler Hotel across the Wabash River in Lafayette. She said, “After having lived in beautiful California, I moved to a seared state [referring to drought-devastated Indiana]. I thought to myself, ‘I can’t stand it.’ The minute I got across to West Lafayette, the people were so nice—so really nice—I changed my mind.”

      Dorothy was appointed dean in August 1933, and she was given what had been the office of the part-time dean of women located on the top floor of Fowler Hall.

      Dorothy said, “The dean preceding me was Carolyn Shoemaker, who must have been a very fine person. I never met her. She had great respect from people on campus.”

      Dorothy climbed to the top of Fowler Hall carrying a box of her workplace goods and discovered that the Office of the Dean of Women was more like the Closet of the Dean of Women. The room was about six-by-eight feet. Tucked away from the accesses of student life, it was a tiny room about to be inhabited by a world of a woman. Dorothy set about moving her files and papers into her new desk. Someone had been given the task of emptying the desk after Carolyn’s sudden death. As Dorothy began to arrange pens and paperclips, she opened a drawer and found in its shadowy recesses a book.

      Dorothy pulled the book from the drawer, feeling the nubby texture of the cover; the scent of leather preceded the exhumation. It was a Bible. She thumbed through the soft, India paper. The title page indicated that the Bible was a 1901 standard edition, “Translated out of the original tongues.” Dorothy thought of her predecessor, whom she had never met but had heard mentioned with great reverence.

      Was the Bible inadvertently left inside of Carolyn’s desk? Or did the person with the unpleasant task of clearing elect to leave the testaments for the next dean of women?

      As the daughter of a Baptist minister, Dorothy was no stranger to the Holy Bible. An analytical thinker, she had her questions regarding its stance on such topics as women and their place. She wrote in 1971 letter, “Aside from the Adam and Eve story, Paul has done more to set back the progress of women than almost any other person. Many people are greatly influenced by Bible references. Probably, we all are, even though unconsciously.”

      Dorothy placed the Bible back into the drawer and continued her task of cultivating the Office of the Dean of Women.

      DOROTHY AND HER PARENTS obtained a house at 825 Salisbury in West Lafayette. Her father worked as a representative for the Equitable Life Assurance Society in the Lafayette Life Building on the courthouse square in Lafayette.

      Dorothy’s first goal as dean of women was to campaign for a more accessible office. She said of her out-of-sight, out-of-mind alcove, “Students would really have to want to see me to find me.” She accomplished the relocation of her office by the “Elliott method,” which President Elliott himself described: “First, you ask the president for something, and he says, ‘no.’ Then you come back and ask again—and he says ‘no’ again. The third time you come back to ask, you pound on his desk, and he says, ‘Oh, go ahead and do it!’”

      Dorothy explained that her experience was a bit different than Elliott’s take: “Well, it turned out just the other way; it was the president who yelled, and I was the one who went and did it. I was never much of a pounder, but I learned how to operate with Elliott.”

      Apparently, Dorothy was, indeed, a quick study of the Elliott method, for her office was moved to the ground floor of the Engineering Administration Building, next to the office of the much-revered Dean of the Schools of Engineering Andrey A. Potter and across the hall from Dean of Men Martin L. Fisher, who had succeeded Stanley Coulter. Dorothy said she made every effort to furnish the Office of the Dean of Women to create a friendly, informal, and cheerful atmosphere.

      At a 1988 Mortar Board Leadership Conference, recorded on a videotape now stored in the Purdue Archives, Dorothy, then age eighty-nine, spoke to a group of students about her first days as dean of women:

      When I came to Purdue in 1933, of course we didn’t have all the things that you have now. We were very simple, and we didn’t have very much of anything for women. No university housing, no placement service for women, no bachelor of arts degree in the University. So it was a lot of fun to start from scratch and see what could be done.

      The Dean of Women’s Office consisted of me, period. No secretary, no staff, just me. I wanted to have the image of the dean of women not to be one of discipline. I thought no intelligent person would spend her life in a job that had discipline at its core, and I didn’t want students to say when they left, “I was never called into the dean’s office once while I was in the University” and be proud of that.

      There were 500 female students at Purdue when Dorothy assumed her deanship. That was about one woman to seven men. She said of the campus, “It was like the old definition of an island—a small body of women completely surrounded by men.”

      Years later, Dorothy reminisced about what she and her women students lacked, yet also what they possessed in abundance: “We didn’t have anything fancy like career counseling. We didn’t know what it meant. We didn’t have television, drip-dries, or power steering. What we did have was trust in each other, and that was very important.”

      In Dorothy’s 1933 annual report, she shared her most frequently asked question, “Just what does the dean of women do?” Dorothy said her office had two main functions: the first was to ensure that the environment in which female students lived, worked, and played was conducive to development and growth. The second was to be of assistance to the individual student. In short, her office was a clearinghouse for matters pertaining to the welfare of female students. Her annual dean of women report was the first to refer to female students as “women” rather СКАЧАТЬ