Colligan to Hunter

Not many New Yorkers realize that their city contains not only the world's largest university, New York University, but also the world's largest college for women. Hunter. Founded in 1870, Hunter College enrolls 6,249 girls by day, 13,307 more in its evening, summer, extension, high school and model-school divisions.* Last week Hunter was given a new president to succeed Dr. James Michael Kieran who is retiring at 69. Much talk arose when the job went to 45-year-old Dr. Eugene A. Colligan, onetime principal of Boys' High School in Brooklyn and associate superintendent of schools, jobs which he is supposed to have obtained with the help of cherubic Boss John McCooey of Brooklyn.

Boss McCooey takes a benignant interest in schools, got his sister Margaret on the Board of Superintendents. His espousal of Dr. Colligan did not immediately suit Manhattan editors, who would have preferred a college-trained executive with no odor of Tammany. But they accepted Dr. Colligan as a pleasant, straightforward, progressive pedagog who may, after all, be just the sort of president for a place like Hunter.

Hunter College has been turning out a steady stream of would-be teachers, for most of whom there are now no jobs. This year 51% of the freshmen announced they wished teacher-training. This was 13% less than last year but still enough to indicate that Hunter must provide wider vocational training. Hunter girls are serious-minded. Hurdling fairly stiff entrance requirements, they are in college not for fun but for hard work. They play basketball and join sororities, societies or Menorah (Jewish cultural society) but Hunter's airs are not of the campus. Around the main building, an antiquated affair uptown between Park and Lexington Avenues, there is no campus to speak of.

A new and more handsome Hunter is rising in The Bronx, but in the meantime classes are crowded, jammed in one after another, some in a 32nd Street loft, some in a 52nd Street public school. Many a Hunter girl walks blocks to college, often carrying lunch which she eats in the basement. Half the girls have outside, part-time jobs. A "tradition" of planting ivy from historic places was begun last year in The Bronx. Someone tried to popularize wearing academic gowns but this died out. Hunter thinks its spring "sing" as exciting as Vassar's Daisy Chain or Smith's Rally Day. Girls from each class gather in the Metropolitan Opera House, wearing costumes, and compete with serious and comic songs based on central themes like Mother Goose or the Arabian Nights.

*Next largest women's college: Smith, with 1,974. New York's other big women's college, Barnard, has 1,011.

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