There's Nothing Like a Dame

Setting fashions in feminism is the happy fate of the women who head Barnard College, the separate but equal female undergraduate division of Columbia University. Before World War II, Miss Virginia Gildersleeve was the formidable crusader who went on to put a woman's touch on the U.N. Charter. Then came Mrs. Millicent Mclntosh, the all-purpose career woman with five children who proclaimed, "The era of women's rights has merged with the era of women's opportunities." This week Barnard (enrollment: 1,500) inaugurated a new pacesetter, President Rosemary Park, a tiny, witty, lucid spinster with a steely mind and a compromise ticket.

These days reformers keep trying to turn womanpower : into manpower. But to Rosemary Park, there's nothing like a dame; a country that discards femininity is a disaster area. As she told her glittering inaugural audience, the real role for women is the fostering of "a nonspecialized but concerned understanding." To keep society from rigidity and atrophy, she thinks "the specialist must be continually challenged by the lay person." Since women have a natural in stinct for fitness, she argues that they should do the challenging--otherwise "the wrong legislation will get passed."

Raised in West Newton, Mass., Miss Park is her own prototype. On the one hand, she is a tireless volunteer worker for causes from prison reform to mental health, belongs to more organizations than a whole clubful of women. On the other hand, she is a trained scholar with an A.B. (summa) from Radcliffe and a Ph.D. (magna) in German studies from the University of Cologne. She is also the daughter of a college president (Wheaton) and the sister of another (Simmons). The first U.S. woman ever to become a college president twice, she takes over Barnard after 15 years of heading Connecticut College, where she launched $10 million in new construction and even started a coordinate men's college.

Though it is hardly faltering, Barnard offers Miss Park some hard problems, the chief one being that most Barnard girls come from the New York area and live off campus. Since it is not a tidy residential school, Barnard needs a strong president to give it focus. Miss Park is also concerned with the trend toward early specialization among undergraduates. To deepen liberal learning, she wants to bring in more creative arts, politics, economics, math, philosophy--to produce laymen who can "challenge the specialist for the public good." Her aim is to put "some nobility, some unselfishness of aspiration into the lives of these young people whom knowledge has given such great power."

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