A Search for Distinction

Speaking to 2,000 sun-warmed students, faculty and guests in the Greek Theater of Mills College, Student President Deborah Campbell caught the essence of the occasion in terms that only students at a women's school can fully appreciate. Said she: "There's a new man around campus." Indeed there is. Last week Robert Joseph Wert, 45, a tall (6 ft. 3 in.), handsome former vice provost and dean of undergraduate education at nearby Stanford, was inaugurated the ninth president of the West's best--and almost only--nonsectarian liberal arts college for girls. He succeeds the retiring C. Easton Rothwell, who led the school for eight years.

Mills is a peculiar blend of old and new, East and West. Founded in 1852 as a seminary-refuge for wealthy girls fleeing the crude gold-mining camp atmosphere of San Francisco, it later thrived on offering an exclusive Vassar-style education without the need for transcontinental travel. Today, Mills accents music, art, dance and drama, boasts some fine Victorian architecture, lets its girls enforce their own honor code in exams and conduct, and observes such quaint traditions as the seniors' tearful last tour of the campus by lantern light, pausing at sites they want to remember.

Desperate Shortage. Today the college's spacious 127-acre Western campus (20 minutes from San Francisco by freeway) also contains glossy ultramodern buildings, and its 770 students are broadly drawn from 45 states and 24 countries; nearly a fourth of the girls get financial help to meet the $3,000 annual charges. No longer interested in a protective, genteel education, Mills girls plunge eagerly into such unsheltered activities as tutoring Negro youngsters in Oakland and studying city government by taking part-time municipal jobs. Blessed with a legion of loyal and generous alumnae, Mills has nearly doubled faculty salaries in the past ten years (current average: $10,556). The college is successfully raising about $2,000,000 annually in an apparently endless fund drive.

President Wert, who has a Stanford Ph.D. in higher education and was an executive of New York's Carnegie Corporation for five years, is determined to lead Mills in new directions. He contends that since research-dominated universities no longer provide a meaningful liberal arts education, this task is now up to the small colleges. The liberal arts, he says, need to be redefined to help meet the "desperate shortage of people who are truly generalists." In his inaugural address, he called for faculty conferences to chart Mills's future, but indicated he will oppose the current trend among women's colleges of associating with a men's school. "I want Mills to take the fullest advantage of the fact that it is a college for women," he said. "I want it to discover a new, distinctive role in American higher education."

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