about these readjustments.
The requirements for admission had to be altered to correspond
with the new system, and the Academic Council spent three years
in perfecting the curriculum in its new form.

Miss Shafer's own department, Mathematics, had already been brought
up to a very high standard, and at one time the requirements for
admission to Wellesley were higher in Mathematics than those for
Harvard. Under Miss Shafer also, the work in English Composition
was placed on a new basis; elective courses were offered to seniors
and juniors in the Bible Department; a course in Pedagogy, begun
toward the end of Miss Freeman's residency, was encouraged and
increased; the laboratory of Physiological Psychology, the first
in a woman's college and one of the earliest in any college, was
opened in 1891 with Professor Calkins at its head. In all,
sixty-seven new courses were opened to the students in these five
years. The Academic Council, besides revising the undergraduate
curriculum, also revised its rules governing the work of candidates
for the Master's degree.

But the "new curriculum" is not the only achievement for which
Wellesley honors Miss Shafer. In June, 1892, she recommended
to the trustees that the alumnae be represented upon the board,
and the recommendation was accepted and acted upon by the trustees.
In 1914, about one fifth of the trustees were alumnae.

Professor Burrell, Miss Shafer's student, and later her colleague
in the Department of Mathematics, says:

"From the first she felt a genuine interest in all sides of the
social life of the students, sympathized with their ambitions and
understood the bearing of them on the development of the right
spirit in the college." And the members of the Greek letter
societies bear her in especial remembrance, for it was she who
aided in the reestablishing in 1889 of the societies Phi Sigma
and Zeta Alpha, which had been suppressed in 1880, under Miss Howard.
In 1889 also the Art Society, later known as Tau Zeta Epsilon, was
founded; in 1891, the Agora, the political society, came into
being, and 1892 saw the beginnings of Alpha Kappa Chi, the classical
society. Miss Shafer also approved and fostered the department
clubs which began to be formed at this time. And to her wise and
sympathetic assistance we owe the beginnings of the college
periodicals,--the old Courant, of 1888, the Prelude, which began
in 1889, and the first senior annual, the Legenda of 1889.