FROM
THE ALUMNAE FOLIO for JANUARY, 1969
MATHER’S
By Elizabeth Walker, ‘39
Associate Dean Flora Stone Mather College
It is an understatement to say that the past ten
years have brought many changes to the Mather campus. The
student themselves represent the greatest change. For example,
prior to 1956 more than half of each freshman class were students
from Greater Cleveland schools who lived at home rather than
on campus. In September, 1967, only 85 of the 366 freshmen
lived in Cuyahoga County. In other words, the number of
freshmen from the Cleveland area has remained fairly constant,
but the total number in the freshman class has tripled. As
a result, we have become in less than ten years a residential
campus with an increase in dormitory population from approximately
400 to over 1100.
In addition to the radical change in the relative
size of the commuting and residential groups, there has been
a change in the residential group itself. The geographical
statistics of freshman classes shown in the table below illustrate
that change and suggest that the students can now bring to one
another a wider variety of environmental influences.
Not only have we seen changes in the size and
character of the college during the past decade, but we have
found the students themselves to be a different group. Their
attitudes and values reflect the attitudes and values of their
families and of the communities where they live. Only 25
years ago the parents of college freshmen were men and women
who had been born soon after the turn of the century and had
lived through the World War I period. Both parents and
children had faced the challenges of a major depression and recession. Our
students then were seeking security—financial rather than
personal.
The parents of the present college generation
were born after World War I. They had known the hardships
of the depression as children and started their married lives
during or immediately after World War II. Some of the families
moved several times while the children were in school and in
many, both parents worked wherever they lived. Parents and children
have enjoyed financial security for the most part, but the children
have not experienced the same personal security and stability
within their families which their parents had.
A less important, but perhaps more obvious, result
of these changes in family life is the lack of concern on living. This
is a “wish and wear” generation. Students,
both boys and girls, who have worn shorts, levis, sweat shirts
and tee shirts almost exclusively for the first ten or twelve
years of their lives are most comfortable in that “uniform.” So
if we tend to criticize their dress, or their manners, we should
remember their earlier patterns.
Our present students are the later post-war babies,
but they still suffered the effects of the high birth rate at
that time. Their schools were overcrowded and the faculty
and staff were often not ready for the large groups who appeared
each fall. Theirs were the first few classes who were subjected
to the use of data processing equipment and who often saw and
heard numbers instead of names. All of these factors have
influenced our present college generation. They have had
less personal attention and perhaps less personal security and
affection than any previous group. If some of them are “turned
off,” perhaps it is with good reason.
There is, I hope, no “typical” Mather
girl, but our students do show patterns which are common to many. They
are seeking identity and recognition as persons rather than as
groups. They need and want privacy, but they seek intimacy,
too. They want to understand and to be understood, but
often they haven’t learned how to communicate effectively. Some
have been “brushed off” so often that they don’t
know how to react to personal attention. They are idealistic
and sensitive and therefore troubled by the ugliness and violence
they see. They don’t want to be led but they do want
to be heard. They want to learn but they often lack the
discipline to become really successful students. They are,
indeed, an interesting and challenging group of young women,
sometimes difficult to work with or to understand but never dull.
As students change, so does the life on every
campus. The change at Mather has been even more dramatic
because of our rapid evolution from a commuter to a relatively
residential campus. Although group identity, per se, is
relatively unimportant to our students, they do have and sustain
a “ready-made” affiliation in their dormitories. Among
the students in the eight large dormitories, we find very few
who move from house to house and almost none who move from complex
to the other. To be a Cutter girl or a Sherman girl is
all of the group identification that most of our students need.
Obviously, this change has affected the interest
in sororities, which formerly provided the Cleveland girls with
a social “group” and furnished an important link
between the commuter majority and the resident minority on the
campus. We now have only three sororities, but they have
strong support from their members, who have chosen a sorority
as an activity important to them, rather than having accepted
membership as a necessity in order to have some affiliation on
campus.
DECADE
OF CHANGE
The classes as distinctive groups and the class
activities as such have also become increasingly unimportant. Most
of our commuting students have substituted for their class the
Town Association with headquarters in their own Town Lounge across
from the mailboxes in the basement of Mather Memorial Building. Even
the representation to “Gov” is based on dorm membership
or membership in the Town Association.
The interest in self-government both in the college
and in the dormitories is strong and both governing groups are
responsible and effective. The changes in their focus and
philosophy demand a separate discussion, but I will say, unequivocally,
that the Mather girl is still an “independent critter” with
her own ideas of what needs to be done and the ability and concern
to carry out those plans.
Another change in emphasis among the students
on campus is their concern for others and their willingness and
desire to be involved. As I have said, they are idealistic
and they are troubled by the poverty, the prejudice and the neglect
that they see in our city and in the whole country. They
do, indeed, question the morality of the war in Vietnam and they
want to express their views. Many students volunteer individually
through their own Volunteer Board to serve in agencies in the
city or support group volunteer activities or join social action
groups. We, too, have our demonstrators.
The dormitories themselves reflect most of all
the decade of change at Mather. They are not only centers
for living but also a center of campus activity. The casual,
friendly atmosphere portrays more eloquently than words the simplicity
of the lives of the busy young people who live there; they have
little interest in frills or formality.
Most of the dormitories have open house each semester,
but otherwise the social life is personal and independent. Fraternity
parties are no longer the favorite pastime on Friday or Saturday
night; the girls prefer parties with small groups of friends
or entertaining their dates at “home.” Their
request for parietal hours was a sincere reflection of the need
for privacy for young couples who want to talk, to listen or
records or to study together. The boys like to come to
our dorms and we are glad to have them there, either as guests
upstairs or in the lounges. We are glad that we have the
kitchenettes, too, because the girls often prepare snacks or
even occasional suppers for their guests.
The Snack Bar, which is opened every night from
10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. in half of the Wade Dining Room, is a
popular place with both the boys and girls living in the dorms. The
Olive Tree, a coffee house sponsored by the United Christian
Movement, is another favorite spot for couples or groups of young
people. The pattern of their social life is simple and
casual.
The desire for independence and privacy increases
among the older students and we find that many are happier living
in single rooms at Mather House as a group of senior women or
with graduate students at Guilford. The pressure of group
living is less obvious in the older, smaller houses and the girls
find it easier to live more independently of one another away
from the “busy” atmosphere of the larger dorms. Some
are happier in even smaller groups at Andrews, which is a cooperative
house for juniors and seniors, or at Perkins, which serves both
as intersorority headquarters and as a residence for members
of each of the sororities. Our latest experiment with independent
dormitories is Claud Foster, formerly a men’s dormitory,
which was moved to the west side of Mather House last summer. It
is larger than Mather or Guilford, but it provides another house
at the center of the campus for juniors and seniors who want
to be close to the library and the laboratories and who want
to live more independently.
Yes, the appearance of the campus has changed
a great deal during the past decade and some of our alumnae might
be surprised at the different, and casual, appearance of the
students. But the most important changes are in the minds
of the young people who promise to bring to their communities
after they graduate a concern for the needs of others and an
awareness of basic values that may refresh suburbia as much as
they have revitalized Mather.
|
