THE PRESIDENTS AND THEIR ACHIEVEMENT


Wellesley's career differs in at least one obvious and important
particular from the careers of her sister colleges, Smith, Vassar,
and Bryn Mawr,--in the swift succession of her presidents during
her formative years. Smith College, opening in the same year as
Wellesley, 1875, remained under President Seelye's wise guidance
for thirty-five years. Vassar, between 1886 and 1914, had but
one president. Bryn Mawr, in 1914, still followed the lead of
Miss Thomas, first dean and then president. In 1911, Wellesley's
sixth president was inaugurated. Of the five who preceded President
Pendleton, only Miss Hazard served more than six years, and even
Miss Hazard's term of eleven years was broken by more than one
long absence because of illness.

It is useless to deny that this lack of administrative continuity
had its disadvantages, yet no one who watched the growth and
development of Wellesley during her first forty years could fail
to mark the genuine progression of her scholarly ideal. Despite
an increasingly hampering lack of funds--poverty is not too strong
a word--and the disconcerting breaks and changes in her presidential
policy, she never took a backward step, and she never stood still.
The Wellesley that Miss Freeman inherited was already straining
at its leading strings and impatient of its boarding-school horizons;
the Wellesley that Miss Shafer left was a college in every modern
acceptation of the term, and its academic prestige has been confirmed
and enhanced by each successive president.

Of these six women who were called to direct the affairs of Wellesley