Education: For Happier Housewives

When Mills College (for women) in Oakland, Calif, began hunting for a new president in 1942, the trustees hoped to find a sedate, older woman for the job. What they finally got was a brash and breezy young man. Lynn White Jr. was a San Francisco minister's son who had studied at Union Theological Seminary and had taken his Ph.D. under Harvard's famed Medievalist Charles Homer Haskins. He was an expert on wine and cooking ("anything with garlic in it"), on 13th Century clocks and chivalry ("the culture of the horsy crowd"). And somewhere...

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