The Deans' Bible. Angie Klink
her chemistry degree to become a schoolteacher, but the physician dream she voiced as a child never came to pass.
Several of Bev’s family members were doctors, and they discouraged her from becoming a physician, fearing that it would be too difficult a career for a woman, or as Bev said, “They decided a female doctor would be inappropriate.” Financial hardships brought on by the Great Depression also made medical school an unrealized dream.
At Randolph-Macon, Bev was influenced by female deans and instructors who, unbeknownst to her at the time, gave her the underpinning for her future calling as a guide for students, encouraging them to follow their innate gifts and capabilities. Deanship was a dream, not yet formed. Bev said:
In 1932, when I entered Randolph-Macon at age sixteen from the small town of Crewe, Virginia, I was probably the most naïve and unsophisticated freshman there. When I was assigned seating at Dean Sallie Payne Morgan’s table for the semester, I assumed that this occurred by chance. It turned out to be prophetic! From her I learned many things beyond the academic. Throughout my experience on campus, there was an atmosphere of caring about individual students. The faculty helped students discover and enhance their capabilities in an environment of personal attention, encouragement, and support.
Personal attention, encouragement, and support would become Bev’s trifecta of student care.
Feminine, ash-blond, and blue-eyed, Marguerite Beverley Stone was born in Norfolk, Virginia, on June 10, 1916. She had an “old Virginia voice,” described by a newspaper reporter as “soft and warm as the mellow glow of antique silver.” Bev’s parents were her heroes. Her father was an electrical engineer, and her mother was a schoolteacher. Her maternal grandmother was a higher education pioneer. Araminta Elizabeth Sims, “Miss Minty,” was one of eight women, along with nine men, to graduate from Indiana University in 1883. So even though she was a “southerner,” Bev grew up with a warm connection to the Hoosier state.
Bev recalled, “The basis to my life has been growing up in a loving family who had reasonable expectations.” Bev’s sister Mary entered Randolph-Macon three years after her older sister. Their parents believed that “anyone who was of reasonable intelligence had a responsibility to do something worthwhile for the sake of others.” Bev would forever carry that parental mantra into her daily life and profession.
When Bev graduated from high school, a friend of her mother’s gave her a book by Edna St. Vincent Millay. That’s when Bev adopted a lifelong love for Millay’s poetry. Millay was five when she began to write poems, and by 1912, when she was just eighteen, she was quite famous. She won a Pulitzer Prize in 1923. Millay read her poems aloud on her series of nationwide radio broadcasts. English novelist and poet Thomas Hardy once said that the two great things about America were its skyscrapers and the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay. Bev’s favorite Millay poem was “A Few Figs from Thistles,” which she could recite by memory:
First Fig
My candle burns at both ends;
It will not last the night;
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends—
It gives a lovely light!
Second Fig
Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand:
Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!
Little did youthful Bev know when she memorized Millay’s poem, that one day as dean of women at Purdue University, she would feel as if she was burning her candle at both ends while building a “shining palace” upon what may have felt like sand. Yet Bev’s students would only see her lovely light.
Millay visited Randolph-Macon to give a lecture while Bev was a student. Bev would forever remember that day. It seems that Millay lived up to her reputation. She was known to drink, party, and have affairs, making her the envy of some during the days of Prohibition, particularly young women. Millay’s poetry was described as “wild, cool, elusive,” and it “intoxicated the Jazz Babies.” Bev described the day she saw Millay: “She had on a green velvet dress with a train on it. She may have done a little too much imbibing because, though she read beautifully, her papers kept dropping on the floor. And her husband in the receiving line pinched some of the students’ behinds.”
Miss Clara Davidson taught courses in religion and character education at Randolph-Macon. She was a stimulating and challenging professor who influenced Bev’s life with her genuine concern for others and her desire to bring out the best in people. Bev remained close to Davidson until the teacher’s death in 1951. Bev said: “[Randolph-Macon] was a small college—750 students. I was invited into the home of all my professors—not once, but many times. That close relationship was the most meaningful part of my college experience. Many times in my career, I have felt Miss Davidson looking over my shoulders! Clara Davidson was my special mentor, role model, and friend through my first teaching experiences. Her moral, spiritual, and ethical values shown like a beacon for countless students.”
When Bev graduated in 1936, three public schools offered her a job teaching mathematics and chemistry. She chose the highest paying at $90 per month with no benefits at a high school in Norfolk, Virginia. Bev said, “I loved high school teaching, but my first day was a disaster. I told the class everything I knew about chemistry. I looked at my watch, and ten minutes had passed.”
Bev’s position acquainted her with the wide range of needs of teenagers in Norfolk. She saw that many needed counseling during the difficult days of the Depression, and she was frustrated at her lack of expertise in the field. Some had personal problems, and she was not equipped to help. One such student was Freddie. He was intelligent, yet he did not like school and missed classes. Freddie had contracted a bad case of trench mouth from smoking cigarette butts that he had found on the ground.
Bev helped Freddie, putting into practice the examples she had been shown by Miss Davidson and the deans and counselors at Randolph-Macon. She saw a smart, likeable young man who was not living up to his fullest potential, and she wanted to change that. Bev helped Freddie, but also Freddie helped Bev, for it was because of him that Bev realized she wanted to serve others as a counselor rather than teacher. She returned to school for a master’s degree in student personnel administration, studying in the summers at Teachers College of Columbia University (where Dorothy Stratton had earned her PhD in 1932) and graduating in 1940.
While at Columbia, Bev made what would become a profound, lifelong connection with one of her professors, Esther McDonald Lloyd-Jones. Esther was a legend in student personnel administration teaching at Columbia from 1928–1966. She wrote the first book on personnel work in higher education, Student Personnel Work at Northwestern University (1929).
Decades later, with a very full and sometimes tumultuous career as Purdue’s dean of women and dean of students behind her, Bev, age sixty-three, wrote a letter to her beloved teacher:
I suspect you have no notion of the extent of your influence you have had from the time I had the first course with you in 1937. You have been a constant inspiration during these intervening years. Your encouragement, support, affection, and warmth have been qualities I have always counted on, and I hope that I may have imparted some of these same qualities to others. Many students I may have reached may not be aware that a part of you has influenced my reaching out to them. Nonetheless this is true.
Esther believed in a holistic approach. She became an advocate for deans of women and deans of men to be educators in an unconventional and new sense, which she called “deeper teaching.” The Lloyd-Jones approach was to help students and staff learn skills for their fulfillment as whole persons, facilitating their personal growth. She believed in creating environments where everyone could feel worthy of receiving and giving respect. She believed students learned through enriched interactions with others, and this learning would best take place in small, natural communities on campus. Esther’s concepts countered the view that student personnel work was a collection of services from which students would select, such as career counseling, academic advising, and testing.
In a sense, Bev became a Lloyd-Jones protégé, who in the coming years would take the holistic approach in her career.