Education: Banded Seven

This week is American Education Week. As in the past, many a speech will be made to celebrate it, with special emphasis on the fact that this year public education is more undernourished than ever before. Specchmakers will exhort taxpayers not to let their lawmakers cut down on education's budget. Private institutions have to levy their own taxes, from alumni and rich friends. Seven women's colleges in the East five years ago hit on the idea of banding together to get better publicity for their appeals—Barnard, Bryn Mawr, Mt. Holyoke, Radcliffe, Smith, Vassar and Wellesley. In 1931 they presented their case—that they get only one-tenth as much as big Eastern men's colleges—at a Manhattan luncheon. In 1932 they had their needs studied by an advisory council headed by Newton D. Baker and including Bernard Mannes Baruch, Thomas William Lament and Owen D. Young. Last week the banded seven sent their presidents West, to dine in St. Louis with friends and alumnae. They went in a distinguished phalanx—Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, Marion Edwards Park, Mary Emma Woolley, Ada Louise Comstock, William Allen Neilson, Henry Noble MacCracken and Ellen Fitz Pendleton, and as dinner speaker they produced Pundit Walter Lippmann. Mr. Lippmann, whose wife Faye Albertson went to Boston University, exclaimed he was "almost ashamed" to be obliged to defend higher education for women, which he called a "rather decent overcoming of a primitive feeling, and we know that new liberties are fragile and must be vigilantly defended. It is, we must realize, scarcely 200 years that it has been considered decent for a woman to publish a book." At the St. Louis dinner no appeals were made for donations but in his speech Pundit Lippmann said: "The time has come to build ... on the assumption that America is rich enough to support a brilliant and enduring civilization." The needs of the seven colleges have been estimated by the advisory council as follows: Barnard, $3,750,000; Bryn Mawr. $2,400,000; Mt. Holyoke, $2.650,000: Radcliffe, $4,945,000; Smith, $5.850,000; Wellesley, $5.500,000; Vassar, $4,550,000.