A Golden Age of Education Continues Apace at the Mount

The great windows at either end of the library at Mount St. Mary’s College reach their two-storied Gothic arches to the heavens and look out on West Los Angeles, Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean.

I love to show off the library to friends. It is a locus for the loftiest thoughts. Never mind that the walls have heard their share of giggling.

I was on top of the mountain at the college last Saturday to attend the commencement exercises and to be counted among the golden anniversary class. There were sisters on the faculty when I was in attendance who would not have made a 12-to-7 bet that I would ever be graduated. I wouldn’t have given any odds, either.

I was working in the theater seven nights a week and going to the Mount in the daytime. I went on the six-year plan because I could never take an 8 a.m. class. By the time I got my makeup off and drove home to Beverly Hills and did an hour or so of homework, it was after 1 a.m. And then my mother died and I took a year off to run the house.

When I started at the Mount, the student body was 110 girls. The graduates on Saturday numbered 138; that counts the master’s degrees and teaching credentials.

Along with Scripps, one of the Claremont cluster, Mount St. Mary’s will be one of only two women’s colleges in the West if Mills College goes through with its plan to go co-ed.

Mount St. Mary’s was founded in 1925 and began to hold classes on top of the mountain in West L.A. in 1930. The school was founded and is run by the Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondolet. The order was begun in France in 1650 and the ladies have picked up an aptitude for teaching along the way. They teach and operate hospitals.

When I was in school, the student names were O’Connor, Learnihan, Joyce, Breen, FitzGerald, Conlon, Milligan. Now the names are representative of the ethnic changes in Southern California and the West. Thirty-five percent of the students are Latino, 13% Asian, 10% black, and 42% white.

About half the entering students of the 1,200-woman college sign up for Leadership 1 and 2.

We didn’t have those classes when I was in school but by the time we had slogged through four years with the St. Joe nuns and four years of philosophy and psychology with the Jesuits who drove up the hill from Loyola, we knew we were strong or at least survivors, even though we didn’t call it leadership.

In 1960, Mount St. Mary’s opened its second campus, a two-year college, offering associate of arts degrees to inner-city women. The school is on the historic Doheny Estate in downtown Los Angeles, an island on Chester Place surrounded by lawns and trees. The students have substantial financial aid. Those who board live in restored Victorian mansions.

Sister Magdalen Coughlin, chancellor of Mount St. Mary’s and my special friend, said last Saturday, “We look for girls who have potential for the baccalaureate program, girls who got off to a slow start or no start at all, and girls who are late to discover they can go to college.”

In the first two-year class, 98% were first-generation college students. Many of the students of the two-year college have few in their families or their neighborhoods who have finished high school.

More than 65% of students who enter go on to pursue a four-year degree. What the figures do not tell is the determination of the faculty. Until you have had a St. Joe nun look you in the eye and say, “You will,” you really have never known what motivation is.

My guest last Saturday was Kay Murphy, a graduate of St. Catherine’s College in St. Paul, Minn., also run by the St. Joseph of Carondolet order. The new president of the Mount is Sister Karen Kennelly from St. Catherine’s.

The graduates marched up the steps to the terrace in front of the chapel where the academic dean, the Rev. Matthew S. Delaney presented the graduates and Sister Kennelly handed them their diplomas. The class whooped and applauded and lots of the graduates waved and gave a triumphant shake of the shoulders. I never thought I’d see or hear those things in an academic procession. But then I never thought I would be sipping a glass of wine in front of those Gothic windows in the library, either.