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When Edna Skinner came to campus in 1919 to direct the new program in home
economics, she became, and remained for nearly three decades, what a current faculty member calls "the only woman having any say." When Helen Curtis came as dean of women in 1945 she took up what would be, when Skinner retired a year later as dean of home economics, a similiarly lonely post: for several decades, while the number of women students increased substantially and the number of women faculty slowly grew, the number of women in high administrative positions increased hardly at all.
Perhaps if we factored in the growth of the campus, and along with it the faculty and administration, we'd discover that, proportionally speaking, women have about the same "say" as in the days of those two great women deans. The gender breakdown of the faculty in 1995 was 388 women to 1,001 men. The great majority of deans, department heads, and vice-chancellors are male. The campus never had a woman president and has not yet had a woman chancellor.
But that is to see the glass as three-quarters empty. Here we rejoice that it's approaching one-quarter full. This group portrait, taken in May in Memorial Hall by Teresa Gauthier, surrounds Emeritus Dean Curtis Cole with the campus' second highest administrator, Deputy Chancellor Williams; its chief academic officer, Provost Crosson; and four of the five women currently called dean.
