Mount Holyoke College

An anniversary of unusual interest and significance in the educational world will be celebrated at Mount Holyoke College on May 21, when tribute will be paid to President Mary E. Woolley on completion of her twenty years of service as chief administrator of the institution. In these twenty years Miss Woolley has not only accomplished great things for Mount Holyoke, but she has done much to further the cause of feminine education and feminine interests everywhere.

When Miss Woolley assumed the presidency of Mount Holyoke in 1901, women's colleges were still regarded with something of condescension. While the curriculum of Mount Holyoke had from the beginning been practically identical with that at Amherst, Williams, and other colleges for men, neither it nor any other instutuion for women had received fair recognition of its academic standing. To-day Mount Holyoke is registered on the United States Government records as a college of the first rank. A chapter of Phi Beta Kappa has for many years been in existence in the college. Miss Woolley has, it will be seen, in a few brief years, achieved recognition of intellectual equality for the college women.

Miss Woolley has done much more for feminine education, however, than raising its academic standing. She has by her work at Mount Holyoke broadened the whole theory and practice of college life. Her object has been to develop the "all-around woman;" the woman who is equipped physically, mentally, and spiritually to become a leader. Interest in dramatic art and music, in athletics, in various aspects of social and religious work, in political matters, as well as a proper attention to the purely social side of life, have freed the college girl of to-day as she is typified at Mount Holyoke from any charge of being priggish or "defeminized." Education has given to her much and taken from her nothing.

What Miss Woolley has accomplished during the past twenty years should not be judged entirely by what she has done for the College; rather by what the College has done for the Nation. Mount Holyoke graudates, inspired by her example and her influence, are filling important posts in all lines of work. From the home-maker, which comes at the head of Miss Woolley's list of occupations, to the dean of a medical college in China, her students are taking part, and an important part, in the increasingly numerous activities that claim women to-day. While a few years ago they had to force their way into the newer and more untried fields of feminine endeaavor, now their services are being eagerly sought after. They have been tried and not found wanting.

Miss Woolley is now engaged in raising a three-million-dollar endowment fund for Mount Holyoke. "The present educational crisis is a most acute one," she said in a recent speech. "The world more than ever before demands trained minds to bring order out of the chaos resulting from the Great War. She demands trained women as well as trained men. Yet such is the financial situation in our instutions for higher learning that not only is further progress impossible, but continuance of the present standards is out of the question, unless additional funds can be obtained."

Three million dollars has been estimated as the lowest amount which will enable Mount Holyoke to keep up the work she has begun. This sum makes no allowance for increased enrollment, even though more than a hundred applicants are each year refused for lack of room. In recognition of what Miss Woolley has done in turning over every June nearly two hundred of the best trained and equipped young women to carry ont he work of the Nation, this money must surely be forthcoming.