Vassar Picks a Woman

Looking for a successor to retiring President Henry Nobel MacCracken, Vassar College set out to get "the best possible person, man or woman." Last week Vassar found what it was looking for, picked the first woman president in its 85 years. The choice was Cornell's Home Economics Dean Sarah Gibson Blanding, 47.

Dean Blanding is a tall, gaunt, plain-drawling person who has come a long way from the small farm she was born on near Lexington, Ky. In her early teens, she got $10 a month for yanking on the bell ropes of the local Episcopal church. She often rode with her uncle, a horse-&-buggy doctor, as he made his rounds, and her earliest ambition was to be a doctor herself. But she settled to a more modest ambition when her father died while she was in high school; she borrowed money and enrolled at the New Haven, Conn. Normal School of Gymnastics. When she graduated, several high schools offered her jobs as a physical instructor, but she took one that paid less, at the University of Kentucky. "I'm a horse trader by nature," says Sarah Blanding. "I told the University I'd take their job if they'd let me go to college in the mornings."

It was a shrewd deal. Before she had even received her A.B., 25-year-old Student Blanding was made Kentucky's acting Dean of Women. She reasoned that "a dean of women has to have the respect of her faculty," so after a year she took a leave of absence to pick up an M.A. at Columbia.

As Kentucky's Dean, Sarah lived with her mother and two sisters on a 250-acre farm near the campus, raised a tobacco crop of her own as a sideline. Dressed in her shabbiest farm clothes ("I figured the poorer I looked, the better price I'd get"), she drove the crop to market in the farm truck, sold her high-quality tobacco at twice the price of ordinary grades.

In 1941 Sarah Blanding joined Cornell's faculty. The next year she became the first woman dean of Cornell's New York State College of Home Economics. She looked pretty austere when she arrived, with her hair done up in a bun, and no hat. But Cornell coeds soon found that the stern face softened easily into a friendly, crooked smile. Until Dean Blanding marched in with her spaniel Shadow, no dog had ever crossed the decorous threshold of Cornell's Martha Van Rensselaer Hall. Within a week dogs were almost as common there as professors. Each spring she was the first to brave Cayuga's icy waters, the last to quit swimming in the lake in the fall. She sometimes gave dinners for 30 people which, without help, she cooked am served herself.

The appointment to Vassar surprised her. Says she: "I've been walking around in a daze since then."

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