Student Reactions and Campus Life at Maryhill College

Hilltopper News Article

The creation of Maryhill College was a momentous occasion for St.Edward’s which would help it to align with the values that it holds today. This first article documents a forum held by St. Edward’s University to help the students and faculty understand what a coordinate system was. Many from the campus did not understand the reasoning for this and what the goal of the coordinate system was. During the forum this question is answered by Sister Marie Andre from the Immaculate Heart of Mary (IHM) in which she states “The coordinate system works on the assumption that men and women are not exactly the same…” [11]. This was done in the early days of the program and not everyone was quite ready for men and women to be integrated yet. This forum did however give the students of St. Edward’s a better idea as to what this program truly was.

General Bulletin for St.Edward's and Maryhill

This Bulletin from the time of Maryhill College helps to show what life was like for the women on campus.  While it does have a focus on the unity of the students and professors it also does make the point “that a women needs to be educated as a WOMAN”.  It clearly outlines that women are not being taught at the same level as men and not being prepared for a similar life after college. They are still holding the belief that woman's place is in the home or as a supporting income to the man of the house. They did not yet move towards the equal treatment that colleges such as the University of Texas had already adopted.  This contradicts some of the other Maryhill documents which advertised similar degrees for men and women. While they might be separated academically, for the most part they were allowed to be a part of a similar social life.  The university saw it as an integral part of the education that men and women learn to socialize with one another. This general Bulletin gives a great view into what life was like for the two colleges and how they interacted with one another.

Hilltopper News Article

The women that attended Maryhill college started to grow tired of the strict rules and regulations that they had to abide by. Towards the end of the coordinate program students began to go more public and voice their opinions, some within the newspaper of the school. In 1969 Martha Brown wrote an article for The Hilltopper voicing her complaints about the system and how it was a burden upon the students. The biggest complaint is that the students cannot truly mature as they are constantly supervised by the university. Mrs. Brown writes “The windows on the first floor at East Hall are bolted so that they cannot be opened, …so that no one can escape after hours” [12]. The women were under the control of the university and could not achieve the growth that they wanted while they were at college. It was the job of the University to educate these women to become adults, but treating them as children would never accomplish this.  Even despite these hindrances she writes “ In spite of all these controls and hindrances, there are still some students who have maintained the ability to think independently, ...there is a very insurmountable obstacle in the guise of Sr. Grace Ellen,...” [13]. The university was not ready for them to have full control over their lives at the university quite yet. This comes in the last year of the coordinate program however so these woman would soon have more freedoms when they were incorporated with St. Edward’s University as its first coeducational program.

Flier

This flier was given to highschool girls around Austin and some surrounding areas to try and convince them to come and join the new coordinate program that was being created by St. Edward’s University. This was sent prior to the first year of the coordinate program to try and get more information out about it and increase enrollment. This flier helped get more of an outreach for the program and helped in increasing the enrollment of women students to the campus. It makes it a point to show that this is a coordinate program and not a coeducational, like what The University of Texas had at the time. Using this it made it a little easier to convince those people who might have been a little more reluctant to send their daughter to a school where men and women were taught together. The flier even states the many degrees that were offered from “Teacher Education, Business Administration, …pre-pharmacy, and pre-dentistry” [14]. The school was offering majors and opportunities similar to the surrounding colleges as well which helps bring in those people who were reluctant to send their child off as I had mentioned before.