Backwash at Mt. Holyoke

While university students rioted and roistered elsewhere throughout the land last week, Mt. Holyoke College at South Hadley, Mass, instituted a quiet check-up of its young ladies' spring activities. Addressing an assembly of the entire student body, 67-year-old Dr. Mary Emma Woolley, Mt. Holyoke's president since 1900, announced that 17 of the young ladies-- an unusually large number--had been suspended for various offenses. None of the offenses, she said, was of a scandalous nature, just general misbehavior. Some of the girls had already completed their suspensions; others might return in the autumn. In accordance with the college's usual policy, no names were to be made public. But one name became known: Freshman Eleanor Woolley, 17, of Bayside, L. I., niece of President Woolley.

One of the busiest of U. S. feminists is Dr. Woolley.* To Mt. Holyoke girls her principles (uttered firmly as she stands erect and impressive in academic gown at morning chapel) are well known. Mt. Holyokers disrespectfully pronounce them "Poise, Poipose and Poiserverance." And they know that a prime tenet of Dr. Woolley's philosophy of Feminism is this: no lady drinks intoxicants. Therefore, few of her students have ever been explicitly dropped for tippling. Before female smoking became commonplace the college had no official rule against it--it was inconceivable that a lady should smoke.

Police of Holyoke, Mass, revealed last week that officials of a woman's college (Smith College is also nearby) had complained of students visiting speakeasies./- Taking notice of a rumor that detectives had gathered evidence for the 17 suspensions, Mt. Holyoke said officially: "The detection of infringement of college regulations was not brought about by detectives, but came through report by the culprits themselves to the college judicial board. There have been no extra fire drills**. . . President Woolley says . . . 'The college is now suffering the backwash of lawlessness which prevails, frequently unchecked, in the country at large. . . .'"

*Next October she will set sail for the Orient, member of a commission appointed by a group of potent Protestant laymen to study missions in the Far East. In 1934 (aged 70) she will retire from her presidency. Other mission examiners will be: Professor William Ernest Hocking of Harvard (chairman); President Clarence Augustus Barbour of Brown University; Dean Frederic Campbell Woodward of the University of Chicago; Dr. William Pierson Merrill of Manhattan's Brick Presbyterian Church; Professor Rufus Matthew Jones of Haverford College; Dean Henry Spencer Houghton of the University of Iowa College of Medicine; Dean Charles Phillips Emerson of the University of Indiana School of Medicine; President Arlo Ayres Brown of Drew University, Madison, N.J.; Dean Albert Russell Mann of New York State's College of Agriculture at Cornell University; Mr. & Mrs. Harper Sibley, rich religious leaders of Rochester, N. Y. /- Last month Dr. Clarence True Wilson, publicly criticizing the personnel of the Wickersham Commission, characterized Commissioner Ada Comstock as "President of a woman's college [Radcliffe] which has been known as one of the wettest and one of the smokiest. . . ." **By sudden, unexpected fire drills at dead of night do alert Mt. Holyoke officials sometimes check up on their students' whereabouts.

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