Lady Dean

One day in 1910, Columbia's square-set President Nicholas Murray Butler sat next a judge of the State Supreme Court in the uptown elevated. "Judge Gildersleeve," said he, "I have good news for you. I've just decided to make your daughter dean of Barnard." The judge considered his verdict carefully. "I am not surprised," he said at last. "Virginia will make you a good dean."

Last week, having been just that for 34 years, Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve, 68, resigned from the job of running Columbia's 1,237 undergraduate Barnard girls. Said she, as matter-of-factly as her father would have, "I may not get away until the middle of 1947, but it's time they started looking for my successor."

Virginia Gildersleeve was born and raised on Manhattan's 48th Street--just across from where Rockefeller Center now stands--but she summered in the country. She was a solemn, round-eyed child who seldom went to parties. Her playmates were a pet goat, a pony and a horse named Billy, and she stood no nonsense from them. Once the pony took the bit in his teeth and tried to run away with her. Virginia guided him through the half-open gate of a handy race track, and let him run around the track until his wind gave out.

Alice Duer (The White Cliffs) Miller, one of her friends in Barnard's Class of 1899, later wrote: "There was not a single member of the class who did not think . . . that Virginia Gildersleeve would one day be Dean." But Virginia Gildersleeve herself neither thought it nor particularly wanted it.

Once she got into teaching, and then into the deanship, Virginia kept Barnard-on-the-subway a lot like herself: unfeathered, serious, competent. She was conservative by temperament, but in her commonsensical way of facing each new project with a scalpel eye, she made Barnard modern. She is a devotee of the classics, but she abolished compulsory Latin. Barnard under Dean Gildersleeve let the girls smoke and taught them sex hygiene without raising the hubbub that these topics roused in other colleges. Once, when asked what obstacles she had had to overcome in her career, she answered characteristically: "None whatever." Nobody would ever call her Mrs. Chips.

Dean Gildersleeve has a cottage in Sussex, England, and a house in sunlit Tucson, Ariz.--but does not plan to retire to either. Last year she was the only U.S. woman delegate at the San Francisco convention. She firmly believes that woman's place is in the world.

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