sentation on the board,
the situation will continue to be anomalous. For it is not too
sweeping to assert that Wellesley's development and academic
standing are due to the cooperative wisdom and devoted scholarship
of her faculty. The initiative has been theirs. They have proved
that a college for women can be successfully taught and administered
by women. To them Wellesley owes her academic status.
From the beginning, women have predominated on the Wellesley
faculty. The head of the Department of Music has always been a
man, but he had no seat upon the Academic Council until 1896.
In 1914-1915, of the twenty-eight heads of departments, three
were men, the professors of Music, of Education, and of French.
Of the thirty-nine professors and associate professors, not heads
of departments, five were men; of the fifty-nine instructors, ten
were men. It is interesting to note that there were no men in the
departments of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, Physics, Chemistry,
Astronomy, Biblical History, Italian, Spanish, Reading and Speaking,
Art, and Archaeology, during the academic year 1914-1915.
Critics sometimes complain of the preponderance of women upon
Wellesley's faculty, but her policy in this respect has been
deliberate. Every woman's college is making its own experiments,
and the results achieved at Wellesley indicate that a faculty made
up largely of women, with a woman at its head, in no way militates
against high academic standards, sound scholarship, and efficient
administration. That a more masculine faculty would also have
peculiar advantages, she does not deny.
From the collegiate point of view, this feminine faculty is a very
well mixed body, for it includes representative graduates from the
other women's colleges, and from the more important coeducational
colleges and state universities, as well as men from Harvard and
Brown. The Wellesley women on the faculty are an able minority;
but it is the policy of the college to avoid academic in-breeding
and to keep the Wellesley influence a minority influence. Of the
twenty-eight heads of departments, five--the professors of English
Literature, Chemistry, Pure Mathematics, Biblical History, and
Physics--are Wellesley graduates, three of them from the celebrated
class of '80. Of the thirty-nine professors and associate professors,
in 1914-1915, ten were alumnae of Wellesley, and of the fifty-nine
instructors, seventeen. Since 1895, when Professor Stratt
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