The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink
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primarily to serve the vocational interests of men.”
In other words, Purdue should offer design classes and majors to appeal to women’s interests and concerns. Now the finding seems obvious, but alas, even today, entrenched male-oriented ideologies prevail for many disciplines like engineering.
Purdue, along with most universities of this era, felt duty-bound to prepare women for marriage and family life in loco parentis. While young women were away from the family nest, it was thought that universities were to be substitute parents, watching over female students, instilling societal expectations, and implementing rules and regulations. This philosophy persisted into the 1960s.
The committee recommended a course on the physical and psychological relations of marriage, problems of home management, economic aspects of marriage, child development, and community involvement. The report stated, “Such knowledge is as essential to effective living today as a knowledge of mathematics or the science of economics.”
Women were to be educated at Purdue, but not at the expense of family life. The course was not required of male students. Presumably, it was assumed men did not need such knowledge for “effective living” as husbands and fathers.
Dorothy explained the committee’s groundbreaking pronouncement: “This committee decided they would try an experiment. It was a small experiment, but we set up a curriculum for women. It was as close as we dare to come to a liberal arts degree.”
The new degree was developed as “liberal science.” One could have termed the new program a “ladies’ agreement.”
A curriculum was created with an emphasis on the sciences, as well as the opportunity to take a broad range of classes from any school in the university. Forty women were permitted to register in the School of Science for the first experimental semester. They were a select group, chosen on the basis of outstanding high school records, test scores, and recommendations, as well as personal interviews. Later, enrollment increased to about one hundred women.
Dorothy, Professor Hazleton, and Professor Dorothy Bovee, the program director, were determined to admit only women capable of meeting rigorous academic standards. In some campus publications, the students were referred to as “the guinea pigs.” Most of the women were explicitly not interested in home economics or technical scientific training. Women who wanted a liberal education and normally would not have considered Purdue learned of the curriculum and sought admittance. This was proof that the liberal science program was serving the audience for which it was created.
The course material presented fundamental scientific principles from an historical and philosophical perspective, and then raised questions about the role of science in contemporary life. The cover on the program brochure carried this subtitle: Modern Training for Modern Women. The women were enthusiastic and found the classes challenging and stimulating, taught by outstanding faculty who welcomed the chance to work with such capable and committed students. Former “guinea pigs” said of Professor Sol Boyk: “He’d have us running around the classroom, pretending to be electrons. He asked questions that set our heads spinning and challenged our traditional thinking methods. We learned to question, not just to be contrary, but to rethink our answers and the possibilities of new solutions. Chemistry was fun when we learned from him, but we learned so much more.”
Another professor who taught the women was Cornelius Lanczos, a shy refugee from Eastern Europe who had worked with Einstein and gave piano recitals for the students. Disheartened by the misconception that mathematics was thought to be a dry subject, he strived to give the women an appreciation of the imaginative and artistic character of mathematical thinking.
Professor Bovee sponsored the class “Women and Women’s Work,” a forerunner of women’s studies courses. The class highlighted important events in women’s history and encouraged students to value the importance of women’s varied roles as paid professionals and community volunteers, as well as homemakers responsible for raising the next generation. The course discussed vocations open to women, the choice between marriage and employment outside the home, the possibilities of combining both, and the possible means of maintaining the best balance between them—all hot topics still debated in the twenty-first century.
In the speech “Guinea Pigs: The Experimental Curriculum for Women at Purdue, 1939–1947” by professor of history Sarah Barnes, she states: “Above all, students in the experimental curriculum were encouraged to think of themselves as leaders—leaders with an awareness and understanding of the critical role of science in modern life, a clear perception of present-day social, economic and political problems and the resolve to confront and solve those problems in an objective and democratic fashion.”
Still today, women are encouraged to have faith in their abilities and think of themselves as “leaders.” The time has not yet come when it is simply an understood fact with no discussion necessary: women are leaders.
The women in the liberal science course were high achievers and felt privileged to be part of a rather elite group. After World War II, Purdue would be teeming with veterans returning to college thanks to the GI Bill. With its selective standards for admission, small class size, demanding courses, and outstanding faculty, the liberal science curriculum developed a reputation as an honors program. Male students clamored for admission. The first group of men selected by the same criteria as the women was admitted in 1947.
In 1985, Dorothy said of the program she helped create: “We really had something going on trying to offer at least a group of women something that was better adapted to what they needed and wanted than had been available before. That [liberal arts degree] got dropped, I must say, after President Hovde came.”
By 1953 under the Presidency Frederick L. Hovde, the School of Science would morph into what would be named the School of Science, Education, and the Humanities, with new separate departments of psychology and sociology, and—what seems misplaced today—a Division of Intercollegiate and Intramural Athletics, at that time a male-dominated entity. In A Century and Beyond, author Robert W. Topping states: “Hovde was always aware of the need to (as he put it) ‘educate the whole man.’ To him that meant exactly what it said: Purdue would achieve greatness only when its topflight scientific, engineering, and agricultural programs were accompanied by first-class undergraduate programs in the humanities and social sciences.”
Topping goes on to write: “One of the requirements for Hovde’s ‘educated man’ was that he at least try to understand or recognize the philosophical, cultural, political, emotional, spiritual, and traditional factors involved in the complex processes that underlie the society in which he would be expected to participate.”
It appears that women were no longer part of the equation that had begun as a liberal science program for exemplary females to learn about the role of science in contemporary life. The “ladies’ agreement” had been superseded by another type of gentlemen’s agreement.
In 1959, Purdue trustees approved the bachelor of arts degree. In The Hovde Years by Topping, he states: “A year later Hovde agreed, though it seemed with no great enthusiasm, to seek from the trustees ‘in principle’ approval of a Master of Arts degree. But he made it clear that Purdue’s involvement in such arts programs should be limited to bachelor’s and master’s degrees. This would not, Hovde felt, raise the ire of his I. U. colleagues.”
The stigma of the “gentlemen’s agreement” between Purdue and Indiana Universities that began at the turn of the twentieth century perpetuated into the 1960s, seemingly edging out women in the process, because as Dorothy stated, “gentlemen stick by their decisions.”
In a 1970 interview with Helen Schleman conducted by Professor R. B. Eckles of Purdue’s Department of History, the two discussed the liberal science program. Eckles revealed this telling piece of information about the dean of the School of Science, Education, and Humanities: “… may I say for the record that Dean W. L. Ayres destroyed every piece of paper relating to those wonderful women and girls; destroyed them in my presence. The record of their achievements was not kept purposely by the dean. I shall say no more than this, that his inability to support the program and his refusal to, in the terms of staff and of, shall we say,