Something to Hold On To

Columbia University's Barnard College (for women) has had only three deans in 57 years, and it took its cautious time about picking a fourth. Ever since Dean Virginia Gildersleeve decided to quit Barnard (TIME, Dec. 10, 1945), faculty and trustees have been weeding out 60 candidates. Last week the weeding was over, and almost in its own backyard Barnard had found a new dean: Dr. Millicent Carey Mclntosh, 48.

Mrs. Mclntosh is a youthful woman with bobbed, reddish-gold hair and a set of firm opinions. A basic one: it is "tragic" that so many educated women "settle down into domesticity and never raise a peep again." Mrs. Mclntosh speaks on this subject with impressive authority. Educated at Bryn Mawr, Johns Hopkins and Cambridge, she began to teach in 1922, married ten years later. Now the mother of five children, she has done an unruffled job of juggling career and family.

After a day's work as headmistress of Manhattan's fashionable girls' Brearley School, Mrs. Mclntosh rushes home to play with her four sons and one daughter (aged 7 to 13) until their 9:30 bedtime. To keep them "individuals," she packs off each of the children (including the twins) to a different school. Weekends, on a Massachusetts farm, the younger Mclntoshes get better acquainted with each other and with mother and father--Dr. Rustin Mclntosh, who is a professor of pediatrics at Columbia and director of Babies Hospital.

The dean-elect thinks colleges should put more accent on the humanities, thus give their students a basic philosophy for living--"something to hold on to." She rates this higher than vocational training, but expects to campaign for one vocation: teaching. Says she: "The colleges of today have a big job, to restore teaching as a major career for women. The best students see the segregation, isolation and exploitation connected with the profession, and they just won't do it any more."

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