Women`s colleges began more than a century ago with an almost sacred mission: to serve as sanctuaries for higher education at a time when many campuses were mostly or exclusively male. Gender barriers have fallen, but contemporary women`s colleges-in the eyes of their supporters-still serve critical needs.
”I believe that our place is even more necessary today, partly because women still find disproportional opportunities both to succeed and to lead”
on coed campuses, says Linda Koch Lorimer. Since 1987 she has been president of Randolph-Macon Woman`s College in this central Virginia community surrounded by the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Despite the dwindling ranks of women`s colleges, Lorimer remains one of their staunchest and most articulate advocates. During a recent interview in the turreted old Main Building overlooking a campus of overarching trees and wisteria, she expands on her views.
”Actually, I think they are the truest place for challenge,” Lorimer says of these colleges. ”We challenge women to the fullest intellectual attainment and in terms of leadership qualities.”
At 38, Lorimer is a dynamo with a laid-back demeanor. She presents the case for the woman`s college with the skill of a veteran courtroom lawyer. Women`s colleges ”don`t offer equal opportunity for their students; they offer every opportunity,” says Lorimer.
These institutions, she insists, have a potential impact far beyond the campus and lives of their students. ”We may be the model for what our students can go on and help replicate in society when they leave here. We have underscored for them what a society can be like when men and women have equal representation.”
Writing in a recently published article on the need for women`s colleges, Lorimer cited studies suggesting that ”equal access has not yet yielded equal opportunity.” One of these, a 10-year study by University of Illinois researchers, showed that women high school valedictorians began to lower their career aspirations by their sophomore years in college, and that only a small percentage pursued advanced degrees.
Lorimer mentions another study that disclosed that students at women`s colleges were more likely to major in economics, mathematics and sciences than women at coeducational colleges.
At Randolph-Macon Woman`s, she explains, ”women have the opportunity to see men and women leading the institution in about equal numbers-the president is a woman; the dean, a man; half of our trustees are women.”
According to the Women`s College Coalition, there are 93 women`s colleges in the U.S. today, fewer than one-third of the 298 that were operating in 1960. Coalition spokesman Peter Mirijanian explains that women`s colleges, like other small liberal arts colleges, encountered stiff, sometimes fatal competition in the 1970s from publicly funded colleges, which were able to offer lower costs and more academic opportunities for students than private schools.
Opening its doors in 1893 with a student body of 106, the college now has an enrollment of 700. Among its firsts: the first Southern women`s college to receive a charter for Phi Beta Kappa, the academic honorary society; the first independent women`s college in the South to have its chemistry department accredited by the American Chemical Society; one of the first Southern colleges to establish a psychology department.
The future of Randolph-Macon Woman`s College appears secure. So far the college has raised $36 million of its $40 million goal in a two-year drive that will end in June 1992. The funds will be used for endowed faculty chairs, scholarships and the maintenance and renovation of its physical plant.
A major boost came from a recent $10.3 million gift from the late William and Catherine Ehrman Thoresen, an alumna of the college. William Thoresen is the former president of Chicago`s Great Western Steel Corp.
The competition for money has heated up in the last 15 years as public colleges, no longer able to rely solely on the tax dollar to sustain themselves, also search for outside funds. Lorimer believes that women`s colleges have an edge in fundraising, especially among their graduates, because most of these institutions are small and, therefore, give students more individual attention than ”the mega-institution.”
She is proud that she is a product of a women`s college. ”I`m an example of the particular debt so many women college graduates feel toward their alma mater,” says Lorimer, the daughter of a Navy pilot who grew up in Virginia Beach, Va., and received her undergraduate education at Hollins College, Roanoke, Va.
According to Lorimer, the college relies on personal appeals rather than mail campaigns for fundraising. ”What works best,” she explains, ”is going to homes and offices and telling alums why we need their help.”
Statistically, Randolph-Macon Woman`s ranks near the top in the percentage of alumnae contributors. The college`s graduates have played leading roles in many fields and communities. Novelist Pearl Buck, a 1914 graduate, was the first American woman to receive the Nobel prize in literature. More recent graduates have included the first woman president of the Boston Bar Association, an acclaimed cancer researcher and the national presidents of the League of Women Voters and the Mental Health Association.
According to Lorimer, ”most of the talk about the amount of time college presidents spend on fundraising is overstated.” Fundraising, she says, is
”part of a larger mandate to go out and share with the college`s external constituency its needs as well as to provide an accounting.”
In traveling around the country, Lorimer says she spends as much time speaking to high school senior classes as to local alumnae. ”Raising funds for something you believe,” she adds, ”is really fun-it is neither an art nor a science.”
After graduation from the Yale University Law School in 1977, she worked a year at the Wall Street law firm of Davis, Polk & Wardwell. Returning to Yale, she was a general counsel for the university, with responsibility for such matters as faculty appointments, affirmative action programs and university governance.
In 1983 she became associate provost of Yale, a position she describes as ”a utility infielder” and ”on-the-job training” for being a college president. In this post she served as the liaison with a number of the university`s schools and colleges.
She also had the opportunity to serve on the executive development committee and saw annual fundraising drives firsthand. From time to time she went to New York to sound out foundations for financial support.
Lorimer became Randolph-Macon`s first woman president in 1987. ”I came here only because it is a women`s college,” she says. ”I`d been approached by some other institutions of similar national stature. But this college`s success in educating women was the real lure to me.”
At Randolph-Macon, Lorimer has successfully courted foundation and corporate gifts. Next fall, thanks to a grant from the DuPont Foundation, the college will begin an American studies program with the formal title of
”American Voices/American Images,” which she refers to as ”the junior year at home.”
Instead of the trek abroad to such traditional academic venues as Paris and Florence, Randolph-Macon women will concentrate on American history, literature, art and government. Lorimer envisions study trips to such places as the Cherokee Indian reservation in North Carolina, Booker T. Washington`s birthplace in Virginia, the state`s Colonial capital of Williamburg and nearby Civil War sites.
”In the 1990s I think we will be spending more time in the appreciation of American society,” she said.
Lorimer talks freely about her private life as the mother of two-daughter Kelly, who will be 9 in June, and 5-year-old Peter. Her husband, Ernie Lorimer, commutes from Connecticut to Lynchburg on weekends. During the week he practices law in Stamford, a short drive from their other home in Greenwich.
Being a college president requires lots of schedule juggling. ”I travel probably two days a week,” Lorimer says, ”and that can mean near and far. I usually try to be gone only one night for the sake of the children.”
She admits to taking shortcuts in order to achieve ”a stable life” and find time ”for family endeavors.” This means ”birthday presents not wrapped creatively” and buying clothing that needs no ironing.
Lorimer rejects any notion that she is a role model. ”I always shy away from the concept of anyone being a role model,” she says. ”There is no single model.
”It would be unfortunate that what we have accomplished for women in the last half century is to exchange one set of expectations for women to be a housewife for another set of expectations, which said you can only be successful if you are a career women.”
In the early 1970s, Lorimer points out, as the barriers to women`s entry into many occupations fell, ”there was a sense that a woman at a
coeducational institution had to go and have a career.”
”It`s my belief,” she observes, ”that we will have achieved the full measure of the women`s rights movement when young women feel the true freedom to pick any combinations of callings so they will be equally free to be a full-time mother as to being a career woman, or being single or being married.”
”Increasingly, I think women will have a life where they are changing over time from a full-time career to being part-time, from a part-time career woman to being a part-time volunteer. I really hope we will start having our young women see that.”
Lorimer is optimistic that ”if we can succeed in doing that for young women, we can succeed in doing it for young men.” As a result, she predicts, ”there will be greater flexibility for individuals and institutions … in looking for careers in life.”
Like First Lady Barbara Bush, Lorimer has faith in the power of volunteerism. ”My dream for Randolph-Macon is that it remains among the strongest of liberal arts colleges and continues to do what we do best-prepare women in careers and professions and in the lives of their communities,” she explains. ”Giving back to the community is a hallmark of the American character.”
As a reminder, Lorimer adds, ”I put my money where my mouth is-I teach a course each year on volunteer service and the public good.”
Inevitably, the question arises whether there is any pressure for the college to admit men as students. Lorimer, of course, has a ready answer:
”The issue doesn`t appear to have been considered in the last 15 years and there doesn`t seem to be an interest in a study of the matter,” she says. ”Randolph-Macon has been a leader in women`s education for our first century and our success is rooted in that.”
