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Away from Heaven. In 1955 Mary Bunting was offered the deanship of Douglass College, the women's branch of New Jersey's state-run Rutgers University, and her decision was characteristic. She felt she had to show her children that people move on, even from "heaven." As it turned out, Douglass fascinated her. It was full of girls who were the first of their families to go to college—yet they really had no idea why they were there. Dean Bunting set out to promote "greater self-confidence. I didn't think these girls realized how able they were, and how much they had to contribute."
At Douglass. Mary Bunting first tried out her ideas for more confidence by letting the girls run their own multilingual course in world poetry ("It was a dandy"). She started part-time studies for married women, and made it a great success—while she herself did radiation research on serratia for the Atomic Energy Commission. When Radcliffe asked her to succeed retiring President Wilbur K. Jordan in 1959, she had doubts. Radcliffe seemed to be "cooking along," and her own campus needed help. But she saw a bigger problem: the low motivation of U.S. college girls in general. Radcliffe, "kind of a prestige spot," seemed the best platform in the country from which to set an example.
In Dirty White Sneakers. If Mary Bunting is concerned about motivation, she is nevertheless not discouraged. As she knows from experience and frequent trips all over the U.S., the college girl of the classes of '62, '63, '64 and '65 is a creature of high emotions, originality, beauty, freedom and wisdom. Notably missing are the "apathetes" of the '50s—the "silent generation." President Edward D. Eddy Jr. of Pittsburgh's Chatham College, a noted expert on U.S. student attitudes, credits the change to the nation's recent peace and prosperity—a nice switch on the notion that only a war or a depression can make students serious. "Today's college girl is more serious about everything, including marriage," says Eddy.
In attitudes, customs, dress and manners, college girls, being natural conformists, tend to imitate one another on any one campus, but they vary from campus to campus. At some schools, girls never read the newspapers. At others, they walk around carrying the Manchester Guardian. At Oberlin, fully half the girls hope to serve overseas in some socially useful manner, from relief work to the Peace Corps. "Idealism is rampant here," says the dean of women.
Dress varies from the chaste pastel uniforms at Indiana's Saint Mary's College (oldest U.S. Catholic women's campus) to the skin-tight skirts, bouffant hairdos and rainbow eye shadow at the University of Miami. When the sun shines at the University of Texas, every female foot seems to be in black loafers. When it rains, out come clean white sneakers. At Northwestern, the uniform is dirty white sneakers and full skirts above the knee; at Reed, some girls go barefoot. Skirts are so short at U.C.L.A. that a nervous professor recently announced: "Move back or leave class until I blacken the lower half of my glasses."