Alumnae Quarterly, Winter 2006

Today's MHC Would Disgust Mary Lyon

Over the years I have become more and more distressed at what I have read in the Alumnae Quarterly and the other publications from Mount Holyoke College. From these reports, I have watched the College and its inhabitants (including former inhabitants) descend steadily and irretrievably into paganism, secularism, and a host of other evils that Mary Lyon opposed throughout her life. In her magnificent book, Mary Lyon and Mount Holyoke: Opening the Gates, Elizabeth Alden Green has recounted the beginning of Mount Holyoke Female Seminary and its early days when young women were trained as teachers and missionaries. If Mary Lyon were alive today to see that her seminary - the seminary she sacrificed her life for, struggled to found, and guided from the deep well of her Christian faith - has become an abomination unto God, she would, I firmly believe, tear the place down with her own hands. My distress has reached the point of disgust and complete alienation from the College. If there is a specific incident that has prompted my long-planned comment, it was the appearance of letters on "Lyon's Pride" in the latest Quarterly.

Judith Vickers Andrews '68
Guilford, Connecticut

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