St. Joan of Webster Groves

The only woman and the only Roman Catholic educator on President Kennedy's advisory panel on research and development in education is a pert, blue-eyed nun addressed with affectionate informality by her fellow panelists as "Sister J." She is Sister Jacqueline Grennan, S.L., 36, vice president of Missouri's Webster College, and her place on the panel is no concession to her sex or religion. She belongs in the trail-blazing company she keeps, an experimental elite--educators of educators--that includes M.I.T. Physicist Jerrold Zacharias, Harvard Psychologist Jerome Bruner and U.S. Commissioner of Education Francis Keppel. To Colleague Bruner, "she is in the great tradition of the abbesses of the 16th century." Co-Panelist Zacharias, a frugal man with superlatives, says, "She may well turn out to be the Joan of Arc of education."

Out with the Tried-and-Tired. Sister Jacqueline was born a country girl, in Rock Falls, Ill., and she has retained the tenacious energy of a girl raised on a farm. A member of the Sisters of Loretto since she graduated from Webster College in 1948, Sister Jacqueline was tried out "on loan" five years ago as vice president for a year. Before very long, the 48-year-old school in the St. Louis suburb of Webster Groves was animatedly percolating with her fresh ideas and projects, and the appointment, which includes control of curriculum development, was made permanent. From the start, Sister Jacqueline took for her target the mediocre, the parochial, the tried-and-tired routines of learning: "We have too many ordinary Catholic women's colleges. We need to build a few terribly strong ones."

Webster is still not terribly strong, but Sister Jacqueline's talent for attracting top scholars is pushing it that way. Troubled that most elementary teachers get too much training in method and too little in subject content, she set up a new series of courses to turn out specialists in mathematics and French. She asked Robert B. Davis, professor of mathematics at Syracuse University, to direct her math project at precisely the same time that Physicist Zacharias was trying to lure Davis to M.I.T. Sister Jacqueline won, and Davis goes to Webster College every other week on a flying commute. To head up the new French program, Sister Jacqueline got Elizabeth Ratte, director of the much-admired Foreign Languages in Elementary Schools program in the Lexington, Mass., public schools. For such experiments in teacher education, Webster has since 1960 won supporting grants of more than $450,000 from the Ford Foundation and the National Science Foundation.

Over the Barriers. Says Sister Jacqueline: "We ought to create the kind of tension that forces students to ask hard questions. Nobody's answers are any better than his questions." She believes that this statement applies equally to theology and philosophy, and once told a group of freshmen: "Unless you have questioned the existence of God by the time you are 19, you're either a liar or a fool."

Reflecting the new intellectual vigor on campus, the share of Webster's 650 students going on to graduate schools has jumped from a tenth to a quarter. Two years ago, Sister Jacqueline won permission for several of Webster's teaching sisters to begin doctoral work at Michigan, Syracuse, Yale, Fordham and Notre Dame universities, and this additional training will fortify Webster's pursuit of excellence. Sister Jacqueline is perhaps proudest of the liaison of scholarship she has established with prominent non-Catholic professors, secular universities, and public school systems. A compliment that she cherishes is: "You have crossed over the barriers." It came from St. Louis' Joseph Cardinal Ritter.

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