College remains a place of value

Bryn Mawr College was a place of refuge for me, from the very first moment that I stepped foot on campus. That happened on a frigid day in January of 1979, when my mother drove me to meet with a member of the admissions committee. There were trees draped in the remnants of an earlier snowstorm, and buildings that looked like they could have been built by Plantagenets and Tudors. It is hard to convey, four decades later, just how overwhelmed I was by the beauty of the place. In those first moments on campus I made a vow to myself that I would do anything and everything within my limited power to get accepted.

A few months later, a letter arrived telling me that my dream had been answered. I would be a member of the Class of 1983. It was as if the Angel Gabriel had come to my window and announced that I, too, had been chosen for some really big adventure. The sacrilege of that thought for a Catholic girl was mitigated somewhat by the idea that I’d be going to the same school that Katharine Hepburn attended. Gabriel, Kate, they were both famous for being brilliant communicators.

Despite the madness that has engulfed my school, I will still love and honor its great spirit.

But that does not mean I’ll ignore the things that are happening on that campus filled with stately architecture and magnificent landscapes. To ignore offense and bad acts is to acquiesce in their perpetuation, and Bryn Mawr deserves more than that from the alumna, like me, who remember what an exceptional place it once was. A school that nurtured and celebrated the fiercely independent minds and personalities of generations of women was, this past semester, the site of a hostile takeover. The people who staged the coup were disgruntled students inspired by the riots and anger spilling into streets after George Floyd was killed.

They wanted to fill the curriculum with classes on white privilege and Black grievance. They wanted to shame their philosophical opponents into psychological submission. They wanted their newly-discovered oppressors and enemies to feel guilty, to beg pardon, to acknowledge their lack of entitlement to a decent education in a tranquil, non-partisan setting. Their actions, styled as some sort of righteous “strike,” ended up shutting the classroom doors to many young women who, while likely sympathetic to their social justice goals, just wanted to study.

When I heard about what was going on at my alma mater, I can’t say that I was particularly surprised. Why should Bryn Mawr be that different from so many other campuses that were engulfed by the spirit of riot, of protest, of anger and of a vengeance that was repackaged as “wokeness?” Why was I surprised that a school that was quite liberal even when I attended so many years ago was not immune to toxic social protest?

I’ll tell you why. I fully expect students to take advantage of the heat and fury of these moments.

That is what young people do, spilling into the streets and occupying buildings and writing manifestos of things they should never get. It is a rite of passage, albeit one that often harms the very people it presumes to assist.

I do not expect adults in positions of authority to roll over like victims of the Stockholm Syndrome and accede to those ridiculous demands. I do not expect the president of the school, Kim Cassidy, to essentially apologize for pointing out that students have a right to go to classes without being shamed and attacked by “strikers.” I do not expect teachers to abdicate their duty to actually teach and instead commiserate with the student commandos.

And that is exactly what happened.

I am ashamed of my school. There are things that have angered or saddened me in the past, but I have never before been ashamed of my alma mater. To be fair, I am certain that they would not be particularly proud of me, or of what I have become: An outspoken, proud conservative woman who sees “wokeness” as an affectation.

But that’s beside the point. Bryn Mawr is a place of beauty and value, rich in tradition and an incubator of “cussed individuals,” as we famously call ourselves. Its caretakers, in caving in and pandering to uninformed malcontents, have breached their fiduciary duty to the students.

They will not rob me of my memories, or my love for that exceptional school. But they very well might have robbed future generations of something much more important: Opportunity, and excellence.