SOUTH HADLEY, Mass. -- While royalty and dignitaries celebrated Harvard University's 350th birthday, the oldest women's college in the country prepared to mark its sesquicentennial.
Elizabeth T. Kennan, president of Mount Holyoke College in western Massachusetts, planned to address about 2,400 students, faculty and staff Sunday at the school's 150th convocation.
Simultaneously, Mount Holyoke will embark on a five-year, $100 million fund-raising campaign at a time when the number of women's colleges and universities in the United States is shrinking.
'It's awful competing on something like this,' Kennan, a 1960 gradaute of the school, said Friday. 'But it's wonderful in the sense we have a simultaneous celebration of education with Harvard. We're both really partners.'
Prince Charles addressed a crowd of 18,000 on Harvard's Foundation Day Thursday. That night, anti-apartheid protesters forced cancellation of a black-tie dinner for prestigious alumni of the country's oldest institution of higher education.
Mount Holyoke College, founded by New England educator Mary Lyon, opened its doors in 1837 as Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and changed to its current name in 1893.
This week, the liberal arts school welcomed a freshmen class of 510 women from 38 states and 21 countries.
Kennan, president of the college for the past eight years, said she expects the number of all-women's colleges to continue to decline somewhat but ultimately stablize. There are 110 women's colleges and universities in the country today compared to 268 in 1960, Mount Holyoke officials said.
'It's not so much a question of whether we can continue to be useful,' said Kennan. 'It's a question of whether there are sheer, raw numbers to support X or Y amount of colleges.
'My own feeling is that women's colleges will and should survive. Perhaps not in the same numbers but in substantially the same numbers.'
