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Appendixes: Appendix A, Appendix
B
Over the past 150 years there has been an enormous increase in the
number of DePauw faculty members and radical changes in their professional
training. Before 1880 the Liberal Arts faculty never numbered more
than 10. In the last two decades of the 19th century, despite a
50 percent growth in student enrollment, faculty size averaged about
17. The ranks of the teaching faculty grew rapidly during the next
quarter of a century, tripling to 50 by 1921 and to 88 five years
later. Financial stringency during the Great Depression reduced
the number of faculty by 15, but DePauw entered another period
of expansion of instructional staff in the late 1930s. Soon after
World War II the number of faculty members reached 100 and by the
late 1950s grew to 150. In the last decades faculty ranks have continued
to expand to approximately 170, but mostly by means of increased
employment of part-time instructors.
DePauw has long celebrated its small classes and close student-faculty
relations. This feature was more characteristic of the Indiana Asbury
and early DePauw period than of the present century. In 1881 there
were just 11 liberal arts students for each member of the faculty.
Since faculty growth did not keep pace with rapid increases in the
student population, there were 26 students per faculty member by
1911. The student-faculty ratio gradually fell over the ensuing
decades, reaching 15 to 1 in the early 1950s and has remained more
or less stable down to the present.
The backgrounds of DePauw faculty members have also changed dramatically.
Indiana Asbury University sought to instill Christian piety in its
students while transmitting a common classical culture through memorization
and recitation from textbooks. Christian character, not professional
training, was demanded of professors, who in the 19th century were
chiefly Methodist ministers or devout laymen engaged in teaching
a wide variety of subjects. Sometimes they were assisted by recent
graduates of the institution. A striking example of such virtuosity
was Professor James Riley Weaver, who came to the university in
1885 with an A.B. and S.T.B. to teach German and French. During
his 30-year tenure he also offered courses in history, political
science, economics, and sociology. But the next year, representing
the wave of the future, Oliver P. Jenkins arrived with a Ph.D. to
teach biology. President John P.D. John's "new education"
required a faculty with professional training in a specific academic
subject. Almost all new instructors appointed after 1890 had at
least a master's degree in their specialty and many had earned doctorates.
At the same time the teaching faculty was divided into definite
ranks; associate professors appeared in the 1890s and assistant
professors in the 1910s.
The "Ph.D. revolution" spread from the top down. The Ph.D.
degree gradually became a prerequisite for appointment to a full
professorship in the College of Liberal Arts (except in fields such
as studio art, where the terminal degree was at the master's level).
In 1881 less than one-fifth of all full professors possessed Ph.D.s;
this proportion grew to one-third by 1891 and one-half by 1911.
It continued to climb at an even faster rate in later decades, reaching
over 80 percent by the 1940s and 96 percent in 1986. Eventually
the same Ph.D. standard was applied to the entire liberal arts faculty.
In 1986, 82 percent of all full-time members of the teaching faculty
in the College of Liberal Arts held doctorates.
The arrival of coeducation in 1867 did not bring equitable female
representation on the faculty. While frequently engaged as instructors
in the Schools of Music and Art, women were notably absent in the
College of Liberal Arts. In 1881, when women comprised one-fourth
of the liberal arts enrollment, there was only one woman, Alice
Downey, an instructor in the preparatory department, among the 17
faculty members listed in the college catalogue.
Only three women appointed to the faculty before 1900 ever attained
full professor rank: Alma Holman (1882-1885) in modern languages;
Belle A. Mansfield (1886-1911) in history and aesthetics; and Minna
Kern (1895-1932) in German and French. By the 1910s there was a
female student majority in the College of Liberal Arts but less
than one-fifth of the faculty were women.
The proportion of female instructional staff gradually increased
to about one-fourth of the liberal arts faculty in the 1920s and
nearly 30 percent after World War II, when the absence of men provided
temporary opportunities for women to enter the college teaching
field. Representation of women on the faculty, however, declined
to about 16 percent by the late 1960s and has only reached 28 percent
in 1986 after a gradual increase in the last decade. Women members
of the faculty have also been clustered disproportionately in the
junior ranks of instructor and assistant professor. Although one-fourth
to one-half of all instructors have been women, they have rarely
comprised as much as 15 percent of full professors. In the 1970s
and 1980s, in fact, less than four percent of all full professors
in the College of Liberal Arts have been women, their lowest representation
since the 1920s.
These patterns reflect national trends. Although education has long
been a field open to women, they were often discouraged from obtaining
the graduate training that was increasingly necessary for a career
in college teaching. Female instructors were more likely than men
to lack the advanced degrees required for promotion to higher academic
ranks. Unlike their male colleagues women faculty members often
had to choose between marriage and a family and the pursuit of a
teaching career. These social constraints discouraged many women
from entering the academy in the immediate post-World War II period.
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Appendixes: Appendix A, Appendix
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