The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink

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СКАЧАТЬ what it said: Purdue would achieve greatness only when its topflight scientific, engineering, and agricultural programs were accompanied by first-class undergraduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.”

      Topping goes on to write: “One of the requirements for Hovde’s ‘educated man’ was that he at least try to understand or recognize the philosophical, cultural, political, emotional, spiritual, and traditional factors involved in the complex processes that underlie the society in which he would be expected to participate.”

      It appears that women were no longer part of the equation that had begun as a liberal science program for exemplary females to learn about the role of science in contemporary life. The “ladies’ agreement” had been superseded by another type of gentlemen’s agreement.

      In 1959, Purdue trustees approved the bachelor of arts degree. In The Hovde Years by Topping, he states: “A year later Hovde agreed, though it seemed with no great enthusiasm, to seek from the trustees ‘in principle’ approval of a Master of Arts degree. But he made it clear that Purdue’s involvement in such arts programs should be limited to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. This would not, Hovde felt, raise the ire of his I. U. colleagues.”

      The stigma of the “gentlemen’s agreement” between Purdue and Indiana Universities that began at the turn of the twentieth century perpetuated into the 1960s, seemingly edging out women in the process, because as Dorothy stated, “gentlemen stick by their decisions.”

      In a 1970 interview with Helen Schleman conducted by Professor R. B. Eckles of Purdue’s Department of History, the two discussed the liberal science program. Eckles revealed this telling piece of information about the dean of the School of Science, Education, and Humanities: “… may I say for the record that Dean W. L. Ayres destroyed every piece of paper relating to those wonderful women and girls; destroyed them in my presence. The record of their achievements was not kept purposely by the dean. I shall say no more than this, that his inability to support the program and his refusal to, in the terms of staff and of, shall we say, financial encouragement, was why the liberal science program was discontinued.”

      Speculating on what could have been with a statement that rings true today, Helen replied: “One can’t help wondering what would have been the final outcome if the liberal science curriculum could have continued and could have expanded. It was ahead of its time; there’s no doubt about it. If we had in this country now great numbers of women who had the kind of background in science that that curriculum provided, we might not be in the difficulty that we’re in, in terms of our environment.”

      The original intent of the liberal science degree—to answer the varied interests of women—had been lost to the winds of time. In the 1950s and into the 1960s, most Purdue female students would be enrolled in the School of Home Economics, and Dorothy’s dean of women successor, Helen, would carry the torch, ever vigilant in her attempt to break women out of the traditional mold.

      In 1988, Dorothy Stratton, then age eighty-nine, spoke to a group of Mortar Board National College Senior Honor Society members. At that time, liberal arts at Purdue had been given a mouthful of a name: Humanities, Social Science, and Education (HSSE, pronounced “hissy”). It seems the University still feared repercussions if they called the offering “liberal arts.” Dorothy told the students in the audience her tale of liberal arts at Purdue and ended on a high note, saying, “I’m told … [our liberal science program] was the acorn into which the great school HSSE has grown. I think it’s great that Purdue now can give to its students the bachelor of arts degree.”

      Purdue has walked a long and crooked path to a liberal arts degree since Amelia Earhart and Lillian Gilbreth encouraged its establishment, and Dorothy Stratton took on the initiative to beckon more women. Today, this field of study is available through Purdue’s College of Liberal Arts.

      PART OF PURDUE’S ATTRACTION for Amelia was the school’s airport, the first to be owned and operated by a university. The campus airfield was made possible with land donated by Purdue Trustee David Ross. He believed that, along with the theory of aeronautics, Purdue should provide practical flight training. Amelia admired Purdue for offering reasonably priced flying instruction for students. In Soaring Wings, George Palmer Putnam wrote of his wife: “The matter of flying-lesson expense worried her. Whereas most girls were not able to earn as much money as boys—no one wanted feminine grease-monkeys around hangars to do the odd jobs which often pay a good part of a young man’s rudimentary training—they had to pay the same price as the boys for their lessons.”

      Amelia especially valued how conclusions from laboratory tests conducted in the aeronautics department at Purdue could be immediately put into practice at the airfield southwest of campus. In George’s Soaring Wings, Amelia is quoted: “You see, my interest in aviation goes into every part of the industry. It isn’t flying alone. To be interested exclusively in pilots would be like being interested solely in the engineer in the railroad industry. It takes from forty to a hundred men on the ground to keep one plane in the air. That is from forty to a hundred jobs per plane—and I don’t think all those jobs need forever be held by men!”

      It was George who first planted the idea of a “Purdue flying laboratory” in President Elliott’s mind. In the early part of 1935, Elliott asked George what he thought Amelia desired most in the field of research and education beyond the classroom. George recounted, “I told him she was hankering for a bigger and better plane, not only one in which she could go to far places farther and faster and more safely, but to use as a laboratory for research in aviation education and for technical experimentation.”

      Amelia said of her husband, “Mr. Putnam, a practicing believer in wives doing what they do best, is an approving and helpful partner in all my projects.”

      The January before Amelia came to Purdue, she flew from Honolulu, Hawaii, to Oakland, California, in her Lockheed Vega in eighteen hours and fifteen minutes, the first person to make this flight. A few months later, she flew from Burbank to Mexico City in thirteen hours and thirty-two minutes for a new record. That fall, Amelia unassumingly drove her steel gray Cord onto Purdue’s campus with her neck scarf billowing and two newly acquired world records under her belt, the belt that held up her avant-garde slacks.

      Amelia yearned to pilot the longest flight of her aviation career, a world flight. While on the expedition, she wanted to test human reactions to flying—responses involving diet and altitude, fatigue, the effect of the stratosphere on people conditioned to lower altitudes, and the differences in the reactions of men and women to air travel, if any.

      In the autumn of 1935, Elliott held a dinner party at the University-owned president’s home, a gray stucco, Spanish eclectic-style house with arched windows and entrance canopy, located many blocks from campus on South Seventh Street in Lafayette. At the party with several Purdue-connected guests, Amelia talked of her dreams for women and aviation. Before the evening was over, David Ross offered to donate fifty thousand dollars toward the cost of a plane that would be Amelia’s flying laboratory.

      Additional donations in cash and equipment were received from J. K. Lilly of Eli Lilly Drug Company, Vincent Bendix, and manufacturers Western Electric, Goodrich, and Goodyear. A total of eighty thousand dollars comprised the Amelia Earhart Fund for Aeronautical Research. The manufacturers hoped Amelia’s female example of flight would help their cause in promoting aviation to women, who at that time displayed “sales resistance” to air travel.

      Last Flight is a book published in 1937 and written nearly entirely by Amelia from an accumulation of journals, logbooks, and letters scribbled in the cockpit as she flew her last flight over four continents. The narrative of her journey was also compiled from cables and telephone conversations. СКАЧАТЬ