Colleges: New Name on Wellesley’s Door

She’s crisp, she’s trim and she mixes a very mean metaphor. “One of the attributes of an administrator is his ability to stick his neck out, to open his mouth and say something, to decide what side of the fence he is on and to take a stand there, to fish or cut bait, to put up or shut up,” she says. She is Ruth M. Adams, 51, dean of Douglass College, the women’s division of New Jersey’s Rutgers University, and soon she will take a stand at Massachusetts’ Wellesley College as successor to departing President Margaret Clapp (who will go on to be head of Lady Doak College in Madurai, India).

Ruth Adams was born in New York City, educated at Long Island’s Adelphi University, Columbia and Radcliffe. She tutored at Harvard, taught English for 14 years at the University of Rochester, went to Douglass to succeed Mary Bunting when Mrs. Bunting left in 1960 to be president of Radcliffe. At Douglass, Miss Adams has been a popular leader: she liberalized curfew hours, fended off attack by war veterans on a satirical poem in the campus magazine, told spooky stories to the girls on Halloween. She plainly admires firm administration but knows that the job consists of “making possible the really important activity of the college, the educational one.”