The Lady Is Not for Drowning

The Lady is Not for Drowning Can a former Roman Catholic nun and onetime Illinois farm girl run Manhattan's city-owned Hunter College --and cope with faculty hostility, student unrest, tight budgets and urban politics? Not according to Russell Miller, a math teacher and chairman of the teachers union at Hunter. When Jacqueline Grennan Wexler was appointed president last month, he said: "She will be dropped into a sea of administrative difficulties, and I predict that she will drown in it."

This week, undaunted by the opposition of some faculty members to her appointment, Mrs. Wexler will take office--and she has no doubts about her ability to swim in that sea. "It seems to me," she says, "that one has always to ask the question of whether he is willing to put his activity where his social convictions are, and mine are in this kind of place."

One Family. The statement was typical of the 43-year-old dynamo who used to be Sister Jacqueline of the order of the Sisters of Loretto. Ten years ago, "Sister J." became president of Webster College, a small Catholic women's school near St. Louis. From that unlikely platform, she crusaded for academic reform and feminism in roughly equal parts. In 1967, she astonished the religious world by getting a papal dispensation that released her from her vows and Rome's approval to secularize the college. Last June she left Webster as Miss Jacqueline Grennan and became vice president of New York's Academy for Educational Development, where she studied ways to expand independent study in U.S. colleges. She also married Paul J. Wexler, the Jewish president of a mail-order recording company, in a Catholic ceremony at which a rabbi assisted.

While purists fret about academic standards, Mrs. Wexler firmly favors an open admissions policy at urban public colleges: "You can't discriminate on 'prior preparation' grounds any more than on economic grounds." She feels that "our country is one human family" that ought to teach the poor and culturally deprived as eagerly as it does the deaf or blind. By "culturally deprived," she means not only Negroes and Puerto Ricans but also whites who are deprived of the opportunity to learn about non-Western culture.

Tall Order. Mrs. Wexler expects conflict at Hunter when the city's plan for open admissions is carried out next fall. But her strategy for dealing with disputes is well defined: "One must never resort to force, psychic or otherwise." Not that she recoils from arguing with her critics. But even though she may consider a certain problem to be a moral issue, she says, "I'll never tell a man he's immoral, because I don't know his conscience."

Though Mrs. Wexler wants more student participation in decision making, she is not about to let any power group take over. "The New England town model of governance is gross naivete, ineffectual and restrictive of freedom. The vote of the majority cannot interfere with the rights of any individual." As for drugs on campus, Mrs. Wexler disapproves but advocates more scientific investigation and saner drug laws. "If we lie to the young in order to discourage them, it's asking the credibility gap to become a gulf."

Hunter College, which celebrates its centennial next month, has obviously acquired a peppery president with big dreams. Mrs. Wexler yearns not only to retain the school's academic rank but to enlarge its social role as well. She wants Hunter to focus on city problems--race, poverty, pollution and transportation, to name a few. A tall order, but as she sees it: "If we don't ask for some trouble today, we're not going to play any part in healing society."

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