Education: Fordham's King

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Anna E. King became a social worker as a sideline; her real job was writing advertising copy for a paint & varnish company in Cleveland. When the nuns of the Convent of the Good Shepherd, where she helped to look after delinquent girls, told her they needed a fulltime, trained assistant, she quit her job, went to Western Reserve University, took her M.Sc. in applied social sciences in 1926. After three years at the convent she became supervisor of the Children's Bureau in Cleveland, joined the faculty of Western Reserve in 1929. In 1934 she went to New York's Fordham University as associate professor in the School of Social Service. Sympathetic, conscientious and reliable, she began to attract the attention of her Jesuit superiors. Last week, at 42, Anna King became dean of the school, first woman ever to be appointed dean of a Jesuit institution.

Although the Jesuits, all men, teach thousands of women, no woman had ever before been named to such a high administrative post in a Jesuit college. But to Fordham's president, the Rev. Robert I. Gannon, Miss King's promotion was "logical," since Fordham has more than 3,000 women students, and in the social service school they outnumber men two to one. Founded in 1916, the School of Social Service is now a fulltime, professional graduate school to which only holders of bachelors' degrees are admitted for the two-year course. Its campus is the eighth floor of Manhattan's Woolworth Building.