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“Writing
a History of The College of New Rochelle:
An Historian at Work"
Dr. James T. Schleifer
Dean
of Gill Library, The College of New Rochelle
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Thank you for
this opportunity to present some thoughts about my work as an historian
as I write a history of The College of New Rochelle. I am very pleased
to be the Keynote Speaker for this year’s Alumnae College.
Let me begin by describing the College. Picture a women’s college, in fact
the first Catholic women’s college in the State of New York, an institution
clustered primarily around the Castle, the landmark building at the center
of the campus, but a college with extension sites in Manhattan, Brooklyn,
and the Bronx, among other places. At these sites courses are offered for
working adults, mostly women, but including some men. The courses are given
in the late afternoons and evenings (and even on Saturday mornings) so
that these working adults can continue to work and do not have to leave
their jobs in order to pursue a college degree. At these sites, the curriculum,
focused on the liberal arts, includes both regular courses and independent
study. When students have completed the necessary courses, they receive
a B.A. degree from the College. The College is known and praised, especially
in the New York City area, for its innovative efforts to provide opportunities
for higher education both to young women of traditional college age and
to professionals (primarily women) who are already employed but who want
an advanced degree.
I should add that the institution I am describing, though inspired by Ursulines
and committed to the tradition of Ursuline education, welcomes students
of any religious faith, and has a lay Board of Trustees, a male President,
and a faculty which is predominately composed of lay men and women.
If you haven’t already guessed, what I am portraying is the College of
Saint Angela, which opened in September 1904, and whose extension program
was announced as early as November 1904 and described repeatedly in early
catalogues from 1906 onward. Note that the institution I have just depicted
pre-dates even the name of The College of New Rochelle, a name not adopted
until 1910. We will return to this portrait later.
As you already know, I am busy writing a centennial history of the College.
Work began, in a sense, more than ten years ago when, at the request of
Sr. Dorothy Ann Kelly, then President, and Dr. Stephen Sweeny, then Senior
Vice President for Academic Affairs, I agreed to write a brief, commemorative
history of The College of New Rochelle for 1994, the ninetieth anniversary.
The idea was to produce an attractive book with lots of photos, but one
with a sound historical text. It was understood at the time that if I enjoyed
the subject and wrote a decent history that people found worthwhile and
interesting, I would build upon my research for the short project to move
forward toward a full, scholarly history of the College. This more ambitious
work would be for the centennial year, 2004, now almost upon us.
Reactions to the 1994 project seemed positive from both sides, from readers
and from me as writer (because I enjoyed doing the research and telling
the story). So in the Spring of 1997 I agreed, with Dr. Sweeny's support
and encouragement, to begin work on a full, scholarly history for the one
hundredth anniversary.
Notice the description: a full, scholarly history. What does that mean?
My 1994 book was thoroughly based on research and reading, so it was scholarly
in that sense. But it was brief, essentially something to put on a coffee
table. It was a book for perusing, for glancing at vintage photos, for
dipping briefly into the history of the College. The 2004 work is to be
something more. It will be much longer, a full re-telling. And of course
it will be a sound, careful history. But for those of you anxiously waiting,
let me warn you that it will not be a detailed, encyclopedic work. That
is not my kind of history. I was trained as an American intellectual historian,
a student of ideas, broad themes, and cultural trends. So what I plan to
write is, of course, a well-written, readable book, but one that is primarily
analytical and thematic. I'm attracted to lines of development, to repeating
patterns, to underlying themes, to persistent issues. Most of all, I envision
a history that will raise questions. The facts and the answers (where possible)
are fine; but the questions are more fascinating. I'll be talking about
some examples in a few minutes.
Let me set some additional parameters. I am more interested in the earlier
decades, the pre-1970s, the first two-thirds of the history of the College.
Partly this preference comes from my training as an intellectual historian;
I love to look for the roots, the beginnings, the essential context that
helps immeasurably to explain all that follows. Partly, however, this preference
comes from the fact of my arrival at the College in September of 1969 as
a new member of the history department; everything since is, in a way,
personal, first-hand, contemporary. In a sense, it's too current to be
real history. So my attention focuses especially on the years before about
1970.
I also began this project with the thought that writing this book is something
for me to enjoy. I keep reminding myself of that. It is not a dissertation
and not a work required for tenure or promotion; since I am near the end
of my career, there are not even any reasons of ambition to spur me on.
This centennial history should be the work of a "mature" scholar who is
finding pleasure in his craft. A labor, yes; but a labor purposely chosen
and something to be savored.
There is another issue. What will be my voice as the writer? I am trying
hard to write with impartiality, taking no side in any particular issue
or conflict that emerged at the College over the past century. But my history,
full and scholarly, will also be interpretive. And any interpretation means
choices made and perspectivestaken. Furthermore, my entire professional
life, for nearly thirty-five years, has been at The College of New Rochelle.
I have great affection for the College, for the Ursulines, for the College
community as a whole. So I cannot escape the bias of presuming that what
has happened at The College of New Rochelle since 1904 is a story worth
telling.
The work of the historian begins, we hope, with research. For me that has
meant a great deal of related reading over the past few years; I have tackled
nearly one hundred books and am still reading as I discover new titles
and as new works are published. My bibliography continues to grow.
Research has also meant intensive work in a number of archives and reliance
on the knowledge and good will of a number of archivists. I began in the
early 1990s with the College archive and have continued to go back to boxes
and collections that still demand my attention; there Sr. Mary Russo and,
more recently, Sr. Martha Counihan, now the College Archivist, have provided
invaluable information and advice. I have also thoroughly explored the
archive of the Community of St. Teresa, of the Convent, where there are
many manuscripts and other sources not found in the College archive; I
spent many productive days seated in the common room at the Convent, reading
through documents provided to me by Sr. Elizabeth O'Brien and Sr. Anne
Bunting, both of whom have served as archivists for the Community. I have
also worked at the archives of the Provincialate, with the eager support
of Sr. Irene Mahoney, who first introduced me to the collections held there,
and, more recently, with the kind assistance of Sr. Marcia Kimball, who
continues to alert me to items she discovers as she is doing her work as
archivist. And in October 1999, I traveled to Rome to devote a week to
research in the archive of the Ursuline Generalate; there I was welcomed
by the Mother General and the entire Ursuline community in Rome and was
especially aided by Sister Marie-Andree Jègou, who was then serving
as archivist and had an incredible mastery of the materials; she readily
placed many wonderful papers at my disposal. More briefly, I visited the
archdiocesan archive at Dunwoodie and the Fordham University archive.
I have also conducted a number of important interviews and have had many
valuable conversations, with Sr. Dorothy Ann, Dr. Sweeny, Sr. Mary Russo,
Sr. Alice Gallin, Sr. Irene Mahoney, Sr. Anne Bunting, Dr. Joan Carson,
and a variety of other alumnae and fellow faculty members. I can't attempt
to list all the names. But conversation, for trying out my ideas as they
evolve and for hearing the stories of individuals involved in various events
and developments, has been an invaluable part of my work.
Finally, I am about to embark on some field work of a different type. Sr.
Martha Counihan has agreed to act as my guide for a visit this summer to
Henry Street and to the parish church of St. Teresa, where, in one sense,
the history of the College began.
My work on the history is moving forward. But in the course of reading,
thinking and writing, I have discovered several obstacles that are intimately
related to the history itself. First, there are several striking “invisibilities”
that make the telling of the story of the College much harder. Most major
studies of American higher education tend to ignore Catholic higher education,
and there are still not many summary works solely on the history of Catholic
higher education. One invisibility. There are still not many general histories
of women’s higher education in America, and again, most of those say little
about Catholic women’s colleges; nor are there many books that focus solely
on the higher education of Catholic women in America. Also largely missing
are histories of individual Catholic women’s colleges, books of the very
kind I am trying to write. More invisibilities. Small colleges, of whatever
kind, that have modest financial resources remain largely invisible in
the story of American higher education. And finally, nuns, women religious,
remain largely invisible as independent women, as builders of institutions,
as leaders in American higher education. Pick up any volume that purports
to recognize and to profile the pioneering figures of women’s higher education
in America; hardly ever will the book include a sketch of a woman religious
who founded or ran a college. Somehow nuns have simply not been seen.
Additional books about all of these topics are now appearing, but these
fields remain sparsely covered. Such persisting invisibilities profoundly
hinder efforts to write the history of any given Catholic women’s college,
to consider what is common or uncommon about a specific institution, and
to understand its larger context.
In fact, the word should be contexts rather than context. And that is another
daunting challenge, for The College of New Rochelle has a variety of significant
contexts: the history of American higher education in the twentieth century;
American Catholic higher education in the twentieth century; the higher
education of women in America; and the higher education of Catholic women
in America. And even this list does not exhaust the possibilities. The
College can be examined through other lenses as well: the history of small
colleges in twentieth century America; the higher education of minorities
in twentieth century America; the higher education of working adults in
late twentieth century America. You can also examine the College as an
institutional reflection of Catholic identity in twentieth century America.
Perhaps my primary purpose in writing is to offer readers a reflective
consideration of the following questions: How does the story of The College
of New Rochelle fit into these many contexts? How does the College follow
patterns? How is the College different or unique? For each period in its
history, I am attempting to measure The College of New Rochelle against
these contexts and to see how the institution might serve as a case study
of particular interest to readers.
What can the College teach us about the development of American and American
Catholic higher education in the twentieth century? What can the College
tell us about women’s colleges, in general, and about Catholic women’s
colleges, in particular, as centers of innovation and creativity? In what
ways can the College be seen as a pioneering institution? We know already
that it was among the first Catholic women’s colleges; at the start and
for most of its history, the College, though Catholic, had a predominantly
lay Board of Trustees; it was probably the only Catholic women’s college
to have a Labor School; and the College was and remains an important innovator
in the education of working adults. But how else does the story of The
College of New Rochelle differ from the histories of other colleges? Other
Catholic colleges? Other women’s colleges? Other Catholic women’s colleges?
And so on.
And finally there is the problem of the silences. Perhaps especially at
institutions founded and run by women religious, archives and official
records are occasionally silent (or nearly silent) about some of the most
significant developments and controversial events. Sometimes, for reasons
of humility, or obedience, or privacy, no (or little) written trace appears
about who said what, who took action, why action was taken. On certain
matters, a discipline of silence was signaled and respected. Much is therefore
left unrecorded. As an historian, I have at times found it difficult to
discover what happened and to reconstruct events for the reader. Sometimes
oral traditions or later interviews can fill the gaps. At other times,
I can only pose questions and offer possible explanations for what will
always remain unknowable.
These silences cause another difficulty for the historian. It is very hard,
for example, to get a sense of the personality of the individual Ursulines
who led the College, especially during the early decades. Manuscripts and
papers in various archives give biographical details and essential information
about official positions, duties, and activities; there is always a lengthy
description of their final hours. But there is little about the person
herself, except by indirection or inference, or occasionally from brief
reminiscences. Again, the impulse for humility, for self-effacement, for
fading into the whole community was powerful. So creating a rich and full
portrait of Mother Irene Gill or of Mother Ignatius Wallace, for example,
is extraordinarily difficult.
But it is not impossible. When I was in Rome, I discovered a hand-written
collection of brief extracts from various letters of Mother Irene. In the
margin were comments written (in French) by the then Mother General, St.
Jean Martin: “All of [Mother Irene’s] letters are written with the simplicity
of a child. She almost always signs: Your affectionate child. [But] when
[I ask] something difficult of her, she adds [instead]: Your obedient child.”
This one remark provides a valuable insight into the powerful character
of Mother Irene.
As I said a moment ago, my history is driven by questions. A summary of
my book might be: Why is this story worth telling? I am wondering what
has remained constant or almost constant over the years. Is it the mission
of education for women? Of access to education for those left behind or
ignored by the larger society? Of commitment to the liberal arts? Of education
of the whole person? Of education for service, especially for training
teachers? And what are the key changes? What is profoundly different now
from twenty, or fifty, or eighty years ago?
And how does the Ursuline tradition shape and define the story? A full
history of the College of New Rochelle probably must begin with a brief
retelling of the history of Angela Merici and her Company of Saint Ursula.
In 1535, twenty-eight women gathered in the Church of St. Afra in Brescia,
Italy, and signed their names in the Book of the Company; this signing
was a token of their pledge to continue to work together under the leadership
and inspiration of Angela Merici, a remarkable woman who was then nearly
sixty years old. For almost five decades, a powerful early religious experience
or vision and a sense of special purpose had set the pattern of Angela
Merici’s life; it was a totally uncommon pattern for a woman of her times.
This gathering of women, including some who were young and unmarried, some
who were older and widowed, called itself the Company of St. Ursula, after
a legendary figure of the medieval Church. The Company was the culmination
of Angela Merici’s life work as she understood God's purposes for her.
Angela and her twenty-eight companions had embarked upon a profoundly innovative
enterprise. Though now voluntarily bound together as companions, they would
continue to be active in the world, pursuing ministries of service to the
sick and the poor, especially to children and young women. Their places
of service would be in hospitals and orphanages, and out in the streets
of the city. Although religious instruction was one part of their effort,
their work in the beginning was mainly charitable, rather than educational.
The Company was emphatically not a religious order. There were no solemn
vows. Instead, each woman made a simple promise to lead a virtuous life
of poverty, chastity and obedience. There was no habit. Instead, each woman
wore simple, modest garb. And there was no cloister. Instead, the companions
lived at home with their own or other families, or in small groups together.
Still very much "in the world," they came together daily for prayer and
spiritual reflection, before beginning their work for the day.
In the years just before her death, Angela Merici dictated her Primitive
Rule which established the organization and guiding principles of her Company.
This Rule set forth the characteristics that marked the community at its
founding.
Historians and biographers have repeatedly noted the highly unusual nature
of Angela's Company. Although a few similar examples exist in the early
history of Christian Europe, her vision of an un-enclosed religious life
for women dedicated to action in the world was distinctive and ground-breaking.
The contemporary parallel most frequently cited by historians is the equally
powerful vision of Ignatius Loyola for a company of men, the Jesuits.
After Saint Angela's death in 1540, her Company continued to grow in number
and soon spread beyond Brescia, undergoing important changes as it expanded.
Ursuline communities sprang up throughout Italy and France. Ursulines also
spread to Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland, and then to many other
places in Europe, North America, and around the world. Eventually the Ursulines
in 1855 would arrive even in the East Morrisania section of the Bronx and
then in 1873 on Henry Street in Manhattan, and ultimately in 1896, in New
Rochelle.
The various modifications along the way substantially transformed at least
the outward appearance of Angela's Company. Angela Merici’s vision of how
religious women might be active in the world remained too radical to be
accepted fully by the society or the Church of the sixteenth and early
seventeenth centuries. No longer living in homes, working actively in the
world to serve the sick and the poor, and joined together as women in service
by simple promises made to each other, the Ursulines by the early 1600s
were within convent walls and bound by solemn vows. And the ministry of
education to girls and young women was now the primary focus. But the fundamental
sense of service remained. And the deeper values described by Angela Merici
in her Rule and in her other short works, the Counsels and Legacy (or Testament)
also endured.
Over five centuries, the revolutionary actions of Angela Merici led to
a series of remarkable achievements by the women of her Company. Hers was
"the first foundation of a religious community for women undertaken by
a woman." (1) The Ursulines were apparently the first teaching order of
women, and they developed an enlightened and pioneering educational philosophy.
It was an Ursuline, Marie Guyart, Marie de l’Incarnation, who was the first
woman religious missionary in the New World (at Quebec). And it was the
Ursulines who came to New Orleans in 1727 and established the first academy
for women's education in the present United States. In the long run, they
also achieved another first: the first Catholic women's college in New
York State.
This thumbnail sketch is hardly exhaustive. I've said nothing about the
creation of the Roman Union at the beginning of the twentieth century,
for example. But I have indicated enough to give a sense of how the Ursuline
tradition has shaped the history of the College of New Rochelle. The Ursulines
of the Community of St. Teresa have never forgotten, for example, that
the legacy of Angela Merici honors adaptation and prudent innovation.
Let us return to some of the key questions of my history. Who was Lucy
Gill, or Mother Irene Gill? A history of the College needs to include at
least a brief biographical sketch of the principal founder. We know that
she was born in Ireland and came to New York in 1868 at about age twelve
with other members of her family. But part of her personal story involves
the broader history of Ireland in the early and mid-nineteenth century.
Dr. Anne McKernan, of our own history faculty and a specialist in Irish
history, recommended valuable readings for me on this aspect of my work.
I would like to call your attention to two characteristics of Ireland at
that time. First, Ireland was a place where education was especially prized.
It was, in fact, in Ireland that the very first national public education
system was established. The reasons for the high value placed on education
are complex, but certainly part of the explanation is that for a long period
Irish Catholics had been denied access to regular schools. And intense
jockeying among Catholics and various Protestant groups for control of
the schools led somewhat paradoxically to a strong national school system
that at least initially was supposed to be independent of any particular
religious community.
Second, Ireland in the nineteenth century was an especially fertile ground
for the creation of new orders of religious women. It was quite common
for young (and even not so young) Irish women to join religious communities.
And in Ireland, the orders tended to be active; they were communities of
women religious engaged in service, working especially in schools, hospitals
and orphanages. So individuals like Lucy Gill [Mother Irene] and her younger
sister, Elizabeth [Mother Augustine], were shaped by a national culture
that made the choice of a religious vocation perfectly normal and even
likely for young women. Irene’s oldest sister, for example, had already
become a Sister of Mercy. And another sister would join the same Sisters
of Mercy in the United States.
It is also essential for us to know something about Mother Irene’s family.
Now let me hasten to admit that genealogy is not my thing; I resist it
as being too antiquarian. But thanks to Sr. Claire Smith, who visited Ireland
to find out about the Gill family, who commissioned two Irish specialists
to do some research, and who has generously shared the findings with me,
we know that Joshua Gill, Irene’s father, was probably a Protestant, that
the family owned various pieces of property in Aughrim and other nearby
towns in County Galway, and that, although they were clearly not poor,
they came from perhaps the poorest and least literate region of Ireland,
the Province of Connaught. We also know that when the national school system
was established in 1831, Joshua Gill allowed a structure that he owned
to be used as the school building. Irene Gill as a small child probably
played around the school. So the family was dedicated to education from
the beginning. (2)
We also know that a first cousin, Mother Celestine Gill, a Sister of St.
Joseph, would later found St. Joseph’s College in Brooklyn, an institution
that at that time was also a college for women, modeled on The College
of New Rochelle. Although repeated efforts by me and by Sr. Martha Counihan
have failed to find any letters or other papers documenting the relationship,
there was apparently a sense of close bonds between the two institutions
in the early years. Think about this achievement. Two women, members of
the same family, both members of religious communities, have the same idea
of founding a college for women. And they carry it out. These two cousins
were institution builders of distinction. And again, what drove them seems
to have been a powerful family commitment to education.
Two intriguing mysteries emerged from my efforts to explore Mother Irene’s
biography. The traditional story, repeated constantly in archival sources,
is that Joshua Gill, the father, went to Australia with at least two of
his children, and that Lucy, her younger siblings and her mother went alone
to New York. Under that scenario, those in America were supposed to await
news of the prospects for the family on the other side of the world. But
nothing ever happened, and the family was left separated. The picture has
always been disturbing. Thanks to recent research by Sr. Martha in census
records, we now know that this version is not true. The whole family, father,
mother, and the six younger children are all listed in the 1870 census.
They lived at 10 MacDougal Street in Manhattan, and Joshua Gill worked
as an “overseer of streets.”
One mystery solved. But another one remains puzzling. There is a strange
but persistent inconsistency in the records about Lucy Gill. Papers in
all of the archives on this side of the Atlantic give her year of birth
as 1856. But parish records and other documents in Ireland unanimously
disagree, giving the year as 1857. Why the discrepancy and what is the
truth? We are left to wonder. Is there any reason why Lucy Gill would have
added a year to her age when she was in her late teens or early twenties?
If anyone can provide an answer to this question, I will be glad to hear
it.
Let me return to other larger questions that my history will address. When
did the College really begin? Many other institutions trace their beginnings
to the establishment of an academy or seminary that strictly speaking was
only a secondary school, and on that basis they claim their starting date.
This matter of origins is one of the few cases where you want to be as
old as possible. The College of New Rochelle has always been scrupulous
about not doing this; we start neatly with our charter in 1904. By that
calculation, we are about to begin our centennial celebration. But is it
so? Have we been too honest?
In 1883 a normal course or normal school department was established at
St. Teresa's Academy on Henry Street. (This was only two years after the
Ursulines of the parish had become the separate Community of St. Teresa.)
Within a few years, the Academy came under the leadership of Mother Irene
Gill. The normal school offered extension courses to prepare young women
for the teaching exams and requirements of the Board of Education of the
City of New York. The courses were highly successful and were soon fully
approved by the Board of Education for teacher training. In fact, St. Teresa's
became the first Catholic high school in New York City to be accredited
by the Board of Education and the only Catholic academy where Board classes
were held for the training of teachers. Both religious and lay teachers
registered and took these courses which were given by college professors
who came in the afternoons to teach. Note that certainly by the 1890s these
were clearly post-secondary or "collegiate" courses. Several letters, dating
from the early twentieth century, written by graduates of these courses
to Mother Ignatius Wallace, indicate that the year or two of study in the
normal school course came after completion of senior year at the secondary
level in the Academy. And one 1893 graduate of the normal school said in
a letter that she later received a diploma in 1908 from the College of
Saint Angela for work done in the normal school. (3)
By the mid-1890s (if not earlier), the success and recognition of the normal
school courses had persuaded Mother Irene of the need for a college in
New York State for young Catholic women. In October of 1896, she wrote
to Archbishop Michael Corrigan for permission to visit an unnamed normal
school in New York City and Horace Mann Teacher's College. In her letter,
perhaps characteristically, she simply declared: "I would like to visit
these institutions." (4) I think she already had clearly in mind the idea
of a college.
In 1896, the Ursulines came to Locust Avenue in New Rochelle, and then
in 1897 they purchased and moved into the Leland Castle. In September of
that year the "Ursuline Seminary," as it was called, first held classes
in the Castle. A year later, in 1898, the Ursuline Seminary received a
charter from the New York State Board of Regents. Included in the charter
was the "power to conduct a collegiate department."
Now this is still somewhat ambiguous. At that time the line between academies
or seminaries, at the secondary level, and colleges, at the post-secondary
level, remained somewhat blurred. And did the power to conduct a collegiate
department mean to offer post-secondary courses or simply to offer courses
that prepared for college? I think that in the case of Mother Irene Gill
and the Ursuline Seminary, given what had happened since the 1880s at St.
Teresa's Academy, the working assumption was that the seminary would continue
to offer post-secondary courses. So by 1898 at the latest, Mother Irene
was not far from establishing a full-blown college. In 1904, she publicly
announced her intention to do so, secured a charter, and in September opened
the doors. It was clearly the rapid execution of a project planned and
pushed ahead for some time. So I think we have been overly modest in our
claims.
Let me shift focus now from questions to the tentative structure of my
history of the College. I want to talk a bit about the bones of the story,
about the fundamental shape of my book. I have chosen to organize this
history of one hundred years in three large periods, each shaped, as I
currently understand them, by the defining vision of a leading figure,
an Ursuline woman religious. As the story will show, many other influences
and currents, individuals and events played a significant part that must
not be overlooked or belittled. But as I interpret the history of the College,
the three visions that I will identify and describe are primary. The first
is Mother Irene Gill’s vision as founder; she had a particular sense of
what a Catholic women’s college should be at the start of the twentieth
century in America. Her imprint is clearest from the 1890s to the late
1930s. The second vision is that of Mother St. Jean Martin, Prioress General
of the Ursulines of the Roman Union. She had a special understanding of
what an Ursuline and Catholic college should be, and her understanding
predominated during the 1940s and 1950s and into the 1960s. And the third
is Sr. Dorothy Ann Kelly’s vision as President during most of the 1970s,
1980s and 1990s; she had a particular idea of what The College of New Rochelle
should do to remain true to its mission in the last decades of the twentieth
century. I do not mean to oversimplify; these visions or concepts are not
exclusive. But for me as I think and write, they help me make sense of
the story. During the period in which each vision predominated, I believe
that each one heavily influenced perceptions, decisions, policies and developments,
that each one truly encompassed the underlying and guiding principles of
each era. For me, these visions do indeed give shape to the history of
the College.
I will begin by giving a brief sketch of Mother Irene’s vision as I understand
it. Perhaps because of her long involvement with the requirements and standards
of city and state Boards, she had a clear sense of meeting the most demanding
standards. She modeled her college on the best of the other women’s colleges.
“Plans [for the new Catholic College of Saint Angela],” according to the
New York Times of November 7, 1904, were “calculated to place the institution
on the same high plane as Barnard, Radcliffe, Smith, and Bryn Mawr Colleges
for women.” The 1906 catalog declared that “This College was established
and is maintained for the sole object of furnishing means and facilities
for the higher education of young women. The College interprets the term,
‘Higher Education of Women,’ as meaning such stimulation and promotion
of the physical, intellectual and moral growth and development, as shall
result in complete womanhood. The college ideal of its graduates is that
of a woman of culture, of efficiency and of power, a woman capable of upholding
the noblest ideals of the home and of the Church and possessed of the training
that shall make her an efficient worker in society and in the professional
world.”
At a time when more and more young women were choosing to go to college,
Mother Irene intended to have an excellent college that would provide them
with a Catholic alternative to the other women’s colleges in the region.
She especially had young Catholic women in mind, but the College was emphatically
open to all. It was an Ursuline enterprise as all the publicity made clear,
but both the Board of Trustees and the faculty were primarily composed
of laymen. For her College, Mother Irene assumed a rigorous curriculum,
grounded in the liberal arts; preparation for the careers that were then
opening up to women, including teaching; a first-rate faculty drawn from
among the best universities (including Columbia, Harvard, Johns Hopkins,
NYU, and the Universities of Paris and Berlin); generous scholarship aid
for those who could not otherwise afford the opportunity; active fund-raising
and the development of an endowment; and top level accreditation by the
outside bodies, agencies and institutions that then made such judgments.
She also insisted on the traditional Ursuline goal of educating the whole
person. And she began immediately to push individual Ursulines toward degrees
so that they could in the future take more of the burden of teaching and
leadership. Of course, she did not succeed in all of this. In fact, her
time and energy were soon largely taken up by new responsibilities as Provincial
for the entire Eastern Province of the Ursulines of the Roman Union. But
her sense of what was necessary in order to have an excellent and flourishing
women’s college in early twentieth century America was remarkably clear
and thorough. On October 14, 1904, only one month after the doors opened,
she wrote to Mother St. Julien, then the Prioress General of the Roman
Union in Rome: “The College here is most promising and I think it will
mean a great deal.” So much depends on our first years; a mistake now would
be almost irremediable.” (5) A mistake is not what she had in mind.
Mother St. Jean Martin’s concept for The College of New Rochelle was quite
different. Let me first set the stage. Mother St. Jean Martin became Mother
General in 1926 and would remain so for over thirty years, until 1959.
In May 1939 she arrived in the United States for a periodic visit to American
Ursuline communities of the Roman Union, and then she was forced to remain
in the United States because of the outbreak of war. She stayed for over
six years, eventually setting up her headquarters in Festus, Missouri.
Deeply interested in Ursuline education, she organized a special conference
at the College of New Rochelle in August 1940, which was attended by over
two hundred Ursulines, and wrote an important book entitled The Ursuline
Method of Education. This volume was very influential at the College of
New Rochelle; all through the 1940s and 1950s and even into the early 1960s,
it was read, studied, and discussed at study days for Ursulines and for
the entire faculty of the College.
Mother St. Jean Martin was firmly committed to several fundamental principles.
She began with a re-examination and re-emphasis of the Ursuline philosophy
and method of education. She believed that the Ursuline legacy of education
was innovative and invaluable. So her first task was creating heightened
awareness, especially among the Ursulines themselves, of Ursuline identity
and tradition. It is no accident that the official emergence of the Ursulines
at The College of New Rochelle, including for example the first Ursuline
President and the development of an Ursuline Board of Trustees, occurred
when her vision predominated.
Within the Ursuline educational enterprise, she stressed several principles:
education for girls and women; education of the whole person, including
the moral and spiritual dimension of the individual; the Ursuline educator
as mother to the student; adherence to high academic standards and goals;
and, more generally, the importance of the life of the mind and of intellectual
achievement. She spoke and wrote about the "sacrament of knowledge." And,
as Prioress General, she consistently advocated the initial and lifelong
education of Ursuline women religious. She endorsed the necessity for Ursulines
themselves to be well-educated, and she developed new ways to further that
purpose. She encouraged a House of Studies at the College, which was a
pioneering effort to foster the higher education of women religious in
the United States, and she formalized the juniorate, a special period of
study and reflection for Ursulines.
As we might expect, St. Jean Martin's book also had deep spiritual purposes;
it reflected her faith, her commitment to the Church, her sense of Catholic
identity. She was in full agreement with the Catholic scholastic revival
which emerged in the late nineteenth century and dominated the first half
of the twentieth century as the most acceptable framework for Catholic
intellectual life and as a particular brand of Catholic orthodoxy during
that whole period.
During her stay in the United States, she found some things she disliked
about American education. It was, she asserted, far too democratic, and
despite her interest in the whole person, she could never appreciate the
heavy dose of physical education assumed to be essential at American schools
and colleges. The American system of college and university accreditation
also baffled her; she was astonished to learn that in the 1930s and early
1940s no graduate programs at Catholic institutions, except those at Catholic
University, had gained approval by the Association of American Universities.
Various individuals, including at least one leader at a Jesuit institution,
tried to explain this situation to her; but she continued to find it very
strange.
Her book was also curiously dated and parochial in certain ways; her sources
were, not surprisingly, heavily French and, perhaps more worrisome, most
dated from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. There were very few
even from the nineteenth century. So she relied heavily on very old and
extremely traditional French pedagogy. There was therefore a grave danger
that her concept of Ursuline education would not entirely fit twentieth-century
America.
In 1942, Mother Thomas Aquinas O'Reilly, then Dean, wrote an application
to Phi Beta Kappa for establishing a chapter of the society at The College
of New Rochelle. Understandably, her report stressed the academic, scholarly
and intellectual strengths and aspirations of the College. She knew Mother
St. Jean Martin's vision of the importance of education and of the intellectual
life, and believing that the Prioress General would surely resonate to
her portrait of the College, she sent a copy of the application, along
with the current catalogue and a long, personal cover letter to Mother
St. Jean. In a summary phrase of her letter, she wrote that the essential
goal was to "follow the ideals of the American college in its Catholic
pattern." Imagine her surprise at the response she received. (6)
In several blunt letters, some directly to Mother Thomas Aquinas and others
to the Provincial, Mother Joan of Arc Cronin, who was responsible for appointing
the Dean, the Prioress General strongly condemned the College on several
fronts. The College was clearly not sufficiently spiritual. There was too
much concern about matters of academic prestige, like Phi Beta Kappa, and
accreditationhonors. Instead the goal should be "being the most Catholic
college in the country." That should be the only honor sought. The catalogue
did not highlight the Catholic nature of the College enough. Courses on
religion were too few; they should be increased and taught four times a
week. Too much focus was placed on the scholarship rather than on the souls
of the students. The "New Rochelle type" should not be merely as Mother
Thomas Aquinas defined her, a girl, admitted on a highly selective basis,
who is "refined and gentle, well set-up," with a good academic record.
According to Mother St. Jean Martin, "her faith, her religious principles,
her character must come first." The lay faculty, too numerous in any case,
should be more Catholic, especially anyone teaching religion courses; this
remark came with specific instructions to begin to move toward a thoroughly
Catholic faculty. The College was too big. The influence on the students
of the Ursulines as models of spirituality needed to be greater. The College
ideally should have only about 300 students rather than the more than 700
then enrolled. Certainly it must not grow larger in the future. Mother
St. Jean Martin made a final point which revealed that different visions
were related to different purposes. A smaller institution, she noted, might
finally produce among the students the religious vocations, which were
so sorely lacking at the College of New Rochelle. Mother St. Jean wanted
more Ursulines.
She also pointedly reminded Mother Thomas Aquinas that real authority over
the College rested with the Mother Provincial and then the Prioress or
Superior of the convent, not with the Ursulines who happened to hold positions
of leadership at the College. And she instructed the Provincial, Mother
Joan of Arc Cronin, to take a more detailed and constant interest in what
was happening at the College.
The response was strong and rapid. Although Mother Thomas Aquinas properly
pointed out in a subsequent letter that her report about the College to
Phi Beta Kappa only addressed those matters of interest to that society
and was not therefore meant to be a complete picture, she asserted that
"we will work hard on your excellent plan." The catalogue, for example,
would be revised to give it "the true Catholic note." And courses on religion
were given a much greater place in the curriculum. Other efforts to implement
the suggestions of the Prioress General began immediately and were carried
forward throughout the 1940s and beyond. “We realize,” Mother Marietta
Marinan, then the Superior, wrote to Mother St. Jean in 1946, “that we
have much that needs to be brought into conformity with your wishes.” And
a year later, she assured the Prioress General, “we are striving to do
what we can to realize your ideal that New Rochelle be a one hundred per
cent Catholic College.”
In 1949, Mother Thomas Aquinas was not re-appointed as Dean by Mother Provincial
Joan of Arc Cronin. So although the vision of Mother St. Jean Martin predominated
and largely shaped the College in the middle decades, it was not without
an initial competing vision offered by Mother Thomas Aquinas, who, I believe,
was simply carrying forward her sense of the earlier vision of the founding
generation: The College of New Rochelle was to be a first-rate Catholic
women's college in the American pattern. Perhaps she took the matters of
religion, of spirituality, of Catholic identity too much for granted. And
I am not saying that the two visions were totally opposed; in many respects
they merely emphasized different aspects of a shared vision. But there
were differences. In any case, I am sure that Mother Thomas Aquinas was
thoroughly astonished by what she had stirred up in Festus. And perhaps
some of us are equally astonished that someone like Mother Thomas Aquinas,
seen by so many as the epitome of the traditional College of New Rochelle,
was somehow found wanting.
This fascinating glimpse into these competing visions for the College leads
me to consider two other matters. The first matter seems very specific,
but has immense implications. When the Dean wrote her report in 1943, enrollment
at the College of New Rochelle numbered over 700 students. Since 1904 the
College had been marked by rapid growth and, by 1926, The College of New
Rochelle was the sixth largest Catholic undergraduate institution in the
United States. (This included both men's and women's colleges.) (7)
Mother St. Jean was now urging the College to cut back to 300 as the ideal
size, half of the then current number; she stipulated that at least the
College should no longer grow. This directive was a fundamental change
in the nature of The College of New Rochelle up to that time; it was to
become a steady-state (if not shrinking) rather than an expanding institution.
The implications, apart from those sought by the Prioress General, were
enormous, especially those involving the student base and finances.
Throughout the late 1940s and early 1950s, there continued to be discussions
about the size of the student body among Ursulines who taught at and led
the College, and the number of students did creep into the range of 800
to 850 by the mid-1950s. But there were constant reminders by some about
the clear preference of Mother St. Jean not to grow. In addition, the Master
Plan in 1958 set the physical parameters of the College campus, a territorial
limit that still essentially defines the College today. Despite all of
this, numbers continued to rise somewhat, so that by the early 1960s the
student body reached about 900. But this was a minimal increase over two
decades, from the time when Mother Thomas Aquinas had written her application
to Phi Beta Kappa.
And since that moment, there had been a tremendous expansion in the number
of students enrolled at institutions of higher education in the United
States. Many colleges of the size and prestige of The College of New Rochelle
had moved by the early 1960s to student enrollment in the range of 1200
to 1500. So The College of New Rochelle was definitely at the small end.
And in the early 1960s the very ground was about to move.
When the rapid and accumulating changes of the 1960s hit The College of
New Rochelle, it found itself with very little room to maneuver. The student
body was already small; it would be extremely hard to adjust to any significant
decrease in enrollment and revenue. Falling student numbers would quickly
put college finances under great pressure. So a decision made in the early
1940s not to grow significantly had unexpected consequences two decades
later; it left The College of New Rochelle that much smaller and more vulnerable
to the transformations of the 1960s.
My second comment about the competing visions of 1942 addresses a much
broader issue. The exchange between Mother St. Jean Martin and Mother Thomas
Aquinas O'Reilly should remind us that the last few decades do not have
a monopoly on questions that now seem central to the enterprise of Catholic
higher education. What is Catholic identity? What does it mean to be a
Catholic college? How is a Catholic college to be defined? And who is to
define it? These questions are complicated by our particular national context.
How do you define an American Catholic college? What does it mean to be
a Catholic college in the United States? Sometimes we forget that an issue,
which is so discussed and so heated in our time, was also faced by earlier
generations.
The tension I have just described between the concepts of two Ursuline
educators in the early 1940s also led me to the working title for my history.
I am persuaded that the story of the College of New Rochelle cannot be
properly told or understood apart from the American context. So, at least
for now, I have decided to call my book: In the American Pattern: A
History of the College of New Rochelle, 1904-2004.
There is still the matter of the third major vision that shapes the structure
of my history, the vision of Sr. Dorothy Ann Kelly, which I describe with
some trepidation, since she may stand up and say I have it all wrong. But
I will give it a try. The decade of the 1960s was transforming, not just
for the Roman Catholic Church or for higher education in the United States,
but for all of American society, politics, and culture. The pace and extent
of change from the early 1960s to the early 1970s was astonishing. By 1970
The College of New Rochelle existed within totally different contexts and
faced severe problems of community cohesion, enrollment, finances, and
fundamental identity. How could the College best remain faithful to the
Ursuline mission to teach women? How could the College continue its
legacy of access to a college degree for those who, like Catholic young
women or working adults of Mother Irene’s era, were usually left aside?
How could the College uphold the Ursuline tradition of creative adaptation
to changed circumstances? And how could New Rochelle continue to champion
the tradition of hospitality in the broadest sense, that is of welcoming
and respecting all individuals as they are?
My understanding is that Sr. Dorothy Ann, building of course on the ideas,
work, and support of many others, saw the new racial openness of the College
and the founding of the School of New Resources, in particular, and the
recasting of the College into four Schools, in general, as contemporary
expressions of Mother Irene’s enterprise. If Mother Irene Gill is the founder,
Sr. Dorothy Ann Kelly is the second founder, the person who carried the
vision forward in a fundamentally different time and age.
Let me conclude. At least one thing is very clear about the task of the
historian: no one works alone. You have heard the names of many individuals
who have helped me tremendously in my research and thinking, and I want
to take this opportunity to thank them once again.
I would like to leave you with one additional thought about The College
of New Rochelle. I have learned in my research that there is no single
year or time in its history that is the defining moment. There is no golden
age. No era can claim to be the essential CNR. What time frame would you
choose? The opening years, the 20s, the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s,
the 70s, the 80s, the 90s? Each period exhibits its particular characteristics.
Each of us is led to think that the years when we were here were the real
ones. But we all need to remind ourselves that the story of The College
of New Rochelle is broader than that. We are all part of a long history
of sustained effort toward a remarkably enduring vision. I remind you of
the portrait I painted at the beginning of my remarks. The persistent mission
of The College of New Rochelle in 1904 and today is perhaps the real heart
of the story.
. .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
NOTES:
1. Peter Waters,
The Ursuline Achievement: A Philosophy of Education for Women, Victoria,
Australia: Colonna, 1994, p. 40.
2. Unpublished reports written by Peter Sobolewski, Irish historian, and
Sean Solon, Irish genealogist, 2000; now in the Archives, CNR.
3. Archives, CNR, Box 54, Mother Ignatius Wallace, OSU, Dean.
4. Archives, Convent of St. Teresa, Correspondence, Box 321, 1887-1913.
5. Archives, Ursuline Generalate, Correspondence of Mother Irene Gill,
Cl. 13, Ja 26, #3218.
6. For the entire exchange between Mother Thomas Aquinas and Mother St.
Jean Martin and related correspondence, see Archives, Ursuline Generalate,
Nj, 65c; and Jb.5, 64 and 67.
7. Philip Gleason, Contending With Modernity: Catholic Higher Education
in the Twentieth Century, (New York: Oxford University Park, 1995), p.
84.
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