Dr. Reinhardt at Home

The sister of the Governor of Alaska went dutifully from class to class with an armful of books. Schoolmarms hovered in little knots around visiting male professors. Undergraduates sported and snorted in Mills College's big outdoor pool, or strolled in summery clothes under the giant eucalyptus trees. To a languid class in Mills's gleaming white music building, Andre Maurois read passages from his autobiography-in-preparation.

"California," he glowed, "is the land of happiness. The ascent to 12,000 feet to cross the Rocky Mountains made us gasp for breath, but the descent at Reno, the rich and verdant oasis of divorce, and that over San Francisco Bay, the most beautiful of landscapes, repaid us for our mountain sickness."

Women, a Thread. Mills College, tucked in the Oakland hills behind the Golden Gate, was trying to make its summer session a rich and verdant oasis of culture. It certainly seemed a little less rushed, a little more cosmopolitan than other campuses in the busy summer of 1942. This aloofness was in keeping with the philosophy of its president, Mrs. Aurelia Henry Reinhardt, who, still dark-haired at 65, prides herself on maintaining a historical perspective. Mrs. Reinhardt believes that Mills, the Pacific Coast's finest college for women, has a special role in the defense of civilization. "Women," she said last week, "must be the thread which carries the past into the future."*

With a few men strung along the thread, Mills's coeducational summer session had 350 students for the summer. One group lived in Orchard-Meadow Hall with A. Maurois, speaking passable French and concentrating on durable French culture. Another, forming a Casa Pan-Americana, bandied Spanish and Portuguese with famed Latin-American Scholar Samuef Guy Inman, even staged fiestas for visiting Latin-American sailors. For music, there was French Composer Darius Milhaud and the Budapest String Quartet, with whom some quartet-struck students carried on a mild flirtation. There were also Architect Richard Neutra, ex-German Political Scientist Hans Simons, many another native and foreign celebrity. But the most popular and interesting character was Aurelia Reinhardt herself.

The Grand Canyon and . . . "There are two things one should see on a trip West," a Boston Unitarian toastmaster once declared: "the Grand Canyon and Dr. Reinhardt." Mrs. Reinhardt this year celebrated Mills's goth anniversary and her 26th as its president by announcing her retirement. Mills's alarmed trustees prevailed on her to stay at least until 1943-A native San Franciscan (her father sailed around the Horn and her mother arrived from Ohio on horseback), Mrs. Reinhardt took over Mills as a young widow with two small boys, raised it from a dowdy finishing school to a western Vassar. Its students run their own affairs, are allowed to stay out until 2:30 a.m. and are Stanford men's favorite dates. Mrs. Reinhardt, whom they fondly call "Pres" to her cheerful face, has two basic principles in educating them: 1) "Women need mental muscles," 2) "Woman is more important than anything she knows." She tries to teach them to be good wives & mothers and to take an interest in creative arts.

No Mills girl, however, has yet come up to her own big-boned, energetic measure. Besides running Mills and raising her two boys (one of whom is now in the U.S. Embassy at Moscow), she has distinguished herself as a Dante scholar, a former president of the American Association of University Women, a participant in the councils of Republican politics and Moderator of the Unitarian Churches of America--the first woman who was ever elected to that job.

*For another opinion about women see p. 55.

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