PROFESSION AND COMMITMENT
McCarthy, Abigail
PROFESSION AND COMMITMENT Our institutions are extensions of ourselves and when they seem to be rocking on their foundations-church, school, family, government, banks, stock market-we wake in the...
...Sister Jean Noehrle, president of (Continued on page 309)Abigail McCarthy (Cont...
...Paul, has reached a record high in enrollment...
...They are persons first, women second...
...In women's colleges or in institutions which provide a similar environment, women can rest from playing their expected role and develop as individuals...
...A closer look at the specifically Catholic women's colleges suggests some other interesting things...
...Most of the strong survivors have been colleges with a long history, identified by place and name and not just as a "work" of one religious order, have a devoted body of alumnae and lay faculty, and have earned places in the world of education...
...The phenomenon has been ascribed to the current feminism, but one skeptical alumna of a woman's college was not so sure...
...And, although their presidents are capable women (even men in a few cases...
...A number of other Catholic women's colleges have encouraging things to report also, according to an article by Sister Catherine Hare in Abigail McCarthy NCR, (October 25, 1974...
...Another note, even more cheering to a trustee of a woman's college like myself, was sounded in the reports that women's colleges are reviving and even increasing in numbers...
...none of these colleges depends on one charismatic name...
...Dire predictions have been common as government funding declined, endowments shrank in the stock and bond market, and alumni looked to their own problems...
...To many persons the prospects of losing their schools can be disorienting, even shattering...
...Catherine's in St...
...Some day that may be possible everywhere, but not yet...
...It seems to me that the old reasons for choosing a woman's college are still valid and have been re-affirmed...
...PROFESSION AND COMMITMENT Our institutions are extensions of ourselves and when they seem to be rocking on their foundations-church, school, family, government, banks, stock market-we wake in the night feeling queasy, as if the very law of gravity were suspended...
...There is an obvious conclusion: these women are happy in their work, and they are willing to continue in the community which has made that work possible...
...It was encouraging then to read that of 2,000 colleges only fifty had closed in the last year, and a large number of those had always been marginal, in any case...
...In our educational institutions as in microcosm we are beginning to see some hopeful responses to the problems brought by change...
...Most other institutions, although in need and going through many adjustments, were stable...
...Almost as many new institutions had opened as had foundered...
...Recent news from the field of education is, therefore, very welcome...
...My own college, St...
...The latter view ignores the fact there has been a return to women's colleges after a great rush for coeducation and that, in the very recent past, women's colleges had a real struggle to stay women's colleges and not become co-educational themselves...
...A teacher in a good college cannot help but be cognizant of the way in which his or her personal effectiveness is extended by the college as a living institution, by its history, by its on-goingness...
...Others were very young institutions, probably founded to take advantage of the great influx of students into the colleges in the '50s and '60s...
...if they are leaders, they have the opportunity to lead...
...This is not to say that nuns in other works have not been able to do the same thing...
...If they are athletic, they can be athletes...
...And in contributing thus to the maturing of personality, served the Church and the world better thereby...
...If we penetrate these dimensions we can hopefully come to a new understanding of the relationship, not the conflict, between change and commitment - a relationship which allows and encourages man to develop the depths and heights of his humanness by giving him a base from which to work...
...Mary of the Woods, examined this balance in a broader way in an address which she gave at commencement at Indiana State University...
...and even more important, because commitment in its essential and root understanding has always implied meeting the demands of growth and of change as well as those of stability, it must not be misunderstood in the narrow focus of a stubborn holding on to an unchanged idea...
...Some of our institutions there are in better shape than we have thought...
...The same personal fulfillment, the sense of personal worth and worth to the institution, the fruitful interrelationships with students and colleagues which are the result of professional growth in a college teacher may also be maturing factors in her relationship to her community...
...It may not have always been the language of the brochures and the baccalaureate addresses but they have been primarily institutions for the education of women, not agencies of the Church...
...She puts it in terms of commitment: ". . . for though change has exploded in rapidity and breadth in our time and must indeed be understood anew, it has always been a given in human life...
...St...
...if they are fascinated with a field of study, they can concentrate on it...
...The presidents are backed by a strong faculty...
...I think there are deeper reasons...
...She may be able to transfer this sense in a meaningful way to the community which brought the college into being...
...however, one of the reasons most often given for leaving by both priests and nuns has been the feeling that they were wasting lives and talents...
...But various communities have noted that there has been less loss among nuns teaching in colleges-especially among those who might be said to have, formally or informally, tenured faculty positions...
...There has been no research with which I am familiar on the correlation between the work of individual religious sisters' colleges and the exodus from religious communities in the last fifteen years...
...One of the moorings is gone, one of the formative structures which gave shape to identity...
...AGB Reports, the organ of the Association of Governing Boards, (that is, boards of trustees of colleges and universities) included an analysis of the survival rate among independent colleges...
...In the college life, an alliance of professionals, it is easy to see the balance which must be struck between the work of the individual and the work of the institution...
...It's still the father who pays," she sniffed, "and I think a lot of upset conservative fathers are still trying to protect their daughters' from this new world...
Vol. 101 • January 1975 • No. 11
