An Independent Livelihood

EDUCATION

At 3:45 p.m. one day last week, President Bancroft Beatley of Boston's Simmons College rose up before the girls of his senior class, picked up a trowel, and cried, "Come on, let's get to work." The president had a lot to do. At 3:45, he slapped in mortar for the cornerstone of a new dining hall. At 3:52, he was doing the same for a new dormitory, and at 3:57 he repeated the process for still another. On its 50th birthday last week, flourishing (1,400 students) Simmons College was making quite a show.

Though not always so prosperous, Simmons has made something of a name for itself in its 50 years. Started mostly as a trade school, it added the liberal arts, today has become a unique combination of both. Unlike Wellesley girls ("just bubbling over with joyful intoxication with the world," says one Simmonsite), or Radcliffe girls ("grimly grappling with unconquerable problems"), or Smith girls ("going about with the patient but businesslike air of putting the cosmos to rights"), Simmons girls are frankly out for jobs.

Suits to Science. All this was what was intended by Founder John Simmons, who began life as a tailor, made a fortune out of introducing the U.S. to the ready-made suit. Probably in honor of the seamstresses he employed, Simmons left the bulk of his estate for a college that would prepare girls to earn "an independent livelihood." In 1902, in temporary quarters near Victorian Copley Square, the college opened, with courses in domestic engineering, secretarial and library work, and general science.

Under the presidency of a former Williams College dean named Henry Lefavour, Simmons climbed out of its position as a mere trade school. In 1927 it was admitted to the Association of American Universities, and two years later it made the New England Association of Colleges and Secondary Schools. Then, in 1933, Bancroft Beatley, a brisk, dapper professor from the Harvard School of Education, took over. After that, Simmons came into its own.

For her $600 tuition, the Simmons student of today leads a life like almost no other college girl. Her campus is the busy Boston Fenway, and only in her first year does she get standard collegiate fare. As a sophomore, she begins to specialize in one of nine different schools--Publication, Library Science, Social Work, Business, Preprofessional Studies, Retailing, Science, Home Economics, Nursing.

Sociology to Fashion. Each of the schools offers broad basic courses to start the student off. A publication major, for instance, must swallow doses of U.S. or British literature; a librarian must take her share of economics, psychology, and sociology. Later on, the work becomes more technical, with everything from copy writing and store operation to diet therapy and fashions.

President Beatley believes that this sort of education is well suited to the modern girl: "The economics of life being what they are, most girls know that they will have to work . . . We are all familiar with the cliche that education is not preparation for earning a living, but preparation for life--as if it were possible to separate the two. For most of us, work is a dominant life interest, and a theory of education which studiously ignores that fact appears to be something less than liberal."

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