© 1997 Lawrence University Press
Student-Teacher Relationships
Just as interesting as the relationships among Milwaukee-Downer faculty members and administrators themselves were the relationships that existed between them and the students. Students' feelings about teachers varied in quality and intensity and ranged from crushes on younger and more physically attractive personnel to a certain awe for a few of the more well-established faculty and administrators. While, as in all schools, there were people whom the students found disagreeable, their attitudes toward those they admired might be seen as having existed on any one of three different levels.
First, students tended to admire those teachers who were youthful and made an attractive appearance. Physical education teacher Miss Elizabeth Dickerson, at Milwaukee-Downer from 1909 to 1914, received students' attention on this account:
There was a gymnastic teacher -- physical education. . . Dickerson. And she was young, reddish hair it seems to me, and very athletic. And, oh, some of the girls thought she was just great. They admired her very much. I don't know that you'd call it a crush, but she was more attractive than some of the other teachers.
Being the object of a student's crush, however, was often tantamount to being admired secretly, from afar. Indeed, there might have been no awareness on the part of a teacher that these feelings toward her even existed. And so, in the absence of reciprocity, if this were to be called a relationship at all, it would have to be regarded as existing on only the most superficial level.
By contrast, the next level of relationship between students and those who taught or supervised them did involve direct contact of the parties with each other. Admiration was a key factor here, too, but, as in the case of Mademoiselle Amélie Serafon, native of France and professor of French at Milwaukee-Downer, it was reciprocated in some way. According to a student who knew her through her retirement years, until she died, Mlle. Serafon:
. . . was a great personality. She came, I think, my freshman year, and that was 1910. . . . By that time she was no longer young; she was young-middle aged, possibly. . . . [In manner of dress] she had French chic, very simple and inexpensive -- I don't think she had means. But, she had an air. She powdered her hair; I suppose it was turning gray, and she used a great deal of powder which kind of came down on her -- she didn't always look very neat! But she was a great personality. . . . She became very active, of course, in the Alliance Française, and she really was the spirit behind it for many years. And very generous; she spent all the money she had. . . . She had so much pride; I know she spent more than she could. She would send beautiful presents to people that did any little courtesy or offered her any hospitality -- beautiful flowers and expensive things that we wished she wouldn't do.
Students found more than just superficial beauty to admire in Mlle. Serafon. She was a woman with style; you appreciated her French costumes, as you did the requirement that at her table in the dining room conversation be carried on in French. She was a woman of great sensitivity; many students were impressed by her dedication to war relief work, including summer trips to Paris during the First World War that they knew she could ill-afford. Most significant, while they never interacted on a very personal level, never shared details of their private lives, Mlle. Serafon nevertheless acknowledged her students' admiration and respect, making them feel that she appreciated them as much as they appreciated her.
Finally, there were those teachers who became "legends in their own time" and who were regarded by students with awe. Ellen Sabin herself was one. Here was a woman whose physical presence alone made an impression upon students:
She was large. She had a moon face. She wore long skirts, and her little feet minced along under those skirts. She wore a shirtwaist. She had a belt, always with a buckle. And her hair was tight back, just tight all the way around, and then she had a little bun right on the top.
Miss Sabin's manner, the way she carried herself, must also have contributed to students' awe:
She was formidable to young girls. I was scared of her, but I admired her very much. She had a very imperious way about her and a beautiful, deep voice . . . . Like many people of that exterior, I think inside she was quite sentimental. I saw her weep in Chapel a couple of times. . . . But she unfortunately had a way of kind of scaring young girls. But I can say that we didn't dislike her, but we were kind of in awe of her.
Being "scared of" President Sabin didn't really mean fearing her. Rather, it meant that students put her on a pedestal. As one of them put it:
Well, I wasn't intellectually equal to her. I mean, I couldn't argue with her -- anything she said, we just said, "Yes, Miss Sabin." It wouldn't have occurred to me to oppose her; I wouldn't know how to do it. It [Sabin's] was an overwhelming personality. But, as I say, I admired her very much; as the years went by I admired her more and more.
Another student reinforced this image. While insisting that President Sabin was not a dictator, she strongly implied that one did not easily contravene Miss Sabin's wishes:
I don't agree with a lot of the graduates -- they were afraid of her -- she was in no sense a dictator. But she was a power: "It's going to be the way I say it's going to be, and that's it." And that¹s the way it was. But that's how she kept Milwaukee-Downer together.
And President Sabin did, indeed, keep Milwaukee-Downer together. If students stood in awe of her, they had good reason to; it was she, more than any other individual, who was responsible for the substantial growth experienced by the school in the period 1895 to 1921.
It would not be an exaggeration to say that, in confronting any issue, President Sabin's approach was always informed by her conception of what would be of maximum advantage to the college. Her consistency in this respect was of such a high level that it would have been difficult not to attribute to her a great share of the credit for the way the school flourished during her tenure. It was her strength of character and purpose that indeed led students and peers, both in and out of the college, to regard her with awe.
"Awe," it will be recalled, also describes the way students felt about other notables among the faculty. Indeed, no account of life at Milwaukee-Downer College would be complete without mention of the one person, next to Sabin herself, who engendered these kinds of feelings, Miss Emily Frances Brown.
Although always listed in the college catalogues as having joined the faculty in 1900, Emily Brown's relationship with the college dated back to the early 1890s, when she was hired, fresh out of Wellesley College, to teach science and physical education at Downer College, then still at Fox Lake, Wisconsin. The story went that she had been recommended by someone who had seen her swinging Indian clubs and thought she would make an excellent calisthenics teacher. She taught at Downer from 1891-94, left for a period of time and did some high school teaching, then returned in 1900 to the recently merged Milwaukee-Downer College, where she remained for 45 years. She no longer taught science, however, and Milwaukee-Downer students knew her only as a teacher of rhetoric and English literature. Why the change from science to English? She told students over the years that an explosion in the chemistry lab "blew her out of science into English." Clearly, Miss Brown was a "character"; she was one of those teachers whom the timid avoided, but of whom enthusiasts could never get enough. An alumna of 1915 -- and an avid fan of Miss Brown -- described her in this way:
Emily Brown! Let me tell you about Emily Brown. . . . Her hair was always stringy. She never got her hair into place. And she always taught us looking out of the window; she never looked at the class. . . . And I simply loved her because she taught poetry; she taught Browning so that you just never forgot about it. . . . Here she would be, staring out of the window and talking about what Browning said about the truth, that it is within us and we should give it an opportunity to come out. She would meet you in the hall. . . , and Emily Brown knew me very well, but she might just as well have said, "Miss Jones, how are you?" as. . . [use my correct name], because she never would have remembered. . . If she were in a college today, they'd call her a "weirdo." She was a weird individual, but believe me, she could teach.
By contrast, another student who encountered Miss Brown at about the same time had a totally different response:
I didn't appreciate Miss Brown. . . I wasn't ready for her. She was a brilliant woman, and people who were particularly interested in English and in drama thought very highly of her. My memory -- now, this is very personal, and it may not be so at all -- is that she was going through some kind of a conversion into I think it was a High Episcopal Church. And in my course on pre-Shakespearean drama -- of course, drama is founded on church service, most of it -- she would stand with this far-away look and lecture in terms that I didn't understand at all, being brought up in a very liberal, as I say Unitarian, religion. . . And I didn't have the wit or the intelligence to go and say, "Miss Brown, I don't understand it. I haven't been exposed to that kind of thinking or service. Is there any way I can find out more about it?" And the consequence was that when the examination time came, I flunked. First time I'd ever failed an exam.
Miss Brown had a distinct style; people who were in her classes, whether they did poorly or well, never forgot her. But though she made a great impression in the classroom, what she seemed to be remembered for most were the plays she produced each year, at Christmas and in May.
There were three original Christmas plays given on a rotating basis: "Fezziwig Swarry," with characters right out of the Charles Dickens her students read in her classes; "The Little Sanctuary," a medieval nativity play that she created out of Biblical sources; and "The Elizabethan Revels," the students' favorite play, portraying a festive, old English yuletide dinner.
Miss Brown, an avid Anglophile to whom authenticity meant a great deal, filled her plays with properties and costumes brought back from frequent summer trips to England. What she treasured most, however, were the various bits of English lore she came upon in her travels through England, which she also incorporated into her scripts. It was Miss Emily Brown, in fact, who discovered, in an old bookshop in Oxford, a yellowing manuscript containing the lyrics and music to a Christmas carol titled "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Bringing it home with her, she gave it its debut at a Christmas dinner for the trustees, held in Milwaukee-Downer's Holton Hall, in 1910. Thus, an old English carol that went on to become part of the American Christmas tradition had its start in what turned out to be Emily Brown's first and most modest Christmas presentation at Milwaukee-Downer.
It is indicative of her concept of education that Miss Brown did not think of production of the plays and pageants as extracurricular activities. Even her students recognized that Miss Brown considered producing the plays an extension of her teaching: "She conceived of teaching as something that stirred up a chain reaction of further learning -- in related arts, in music, in drama, and dance." Miss Brown did not hesitate to involve any and every student whom she encountered and thought a suitable candidate for a part in the play. In fact, according to an account in a school publication, Hawthorn Leaves, her casting methods were legendary:
From the opening day of the fall semester Miss Brown could be observed closely studying every new student in the halls. Soon little notes signed E.F.B. would appear on the bulletin board inviting Miss So and So to come to Room 14 for an appointment during the noon hour. Not knowing Miss Brown very well, the student would be either terrified or astonished when Miss Brown handed her a book, marked a passage, and said, "Read this to me." Nobody thought of demurring, and frequently a very much surprised freshman would find herself cast for an important role in the Christmas Play.
Students who had experienced this firsthand remembered it for the rest of their lives. An alumna, age 93, had vivid memory of her friend Milda's encounter with Miss Brown when they were very new freshmen at Milwaukee-Downer:
I remember one of my very dearest friends. . . came down the hall one day, and Miss Brown looked at her, and she said, "There's Plum Pudding, Plum Pudding you will be!" And poor Milda didn't know what she was talking about, but she was talking about the Christmas play.
Years later, in a written tribute to Miss Brown, Milda herself told of the effects participation in this play had had, not only upon herself, but upon her family as well:
Not only I, . . . but the whole family was touched by the excitement which educated us in old English Christmas lore when I was cast as "Plum Pudding." My mother was certainly confused but determined to make correctly that brown and purple costume which would make me look like a fat pudding as I stepped gaily on to the stage, burning pudding held aloft, announcing: "Here come I, Plum Pudding so brown, The plumpest of persons in all London town, As round as a ball and as brown as a berry, With sauce and with brandy to make you all merry!"
The drama was, in fact, so important to Miss Brown that she did not miss an opportunity to create and heighten it. She turned her announcement of the cast for the coming production each year into an eagerly-anticipated ritual:
She would walk down the long aisle of the college chapel on the first fall day which carried a trace of snow in the air. Under her arm she carried a large book with two wide red ribbons hanging from its pages. Suspense would mount as she opened the volume to the current entry, and slowly divulged which of the three plays was to be produced. Then she would gradually reveal the cast, saving her major roles for the final announcement, which always met with a burst of applause.
Miss Emily Brown, and numerous colleagues, were strong models of individuality and independence for the young undergraduate women at Milwaukee-Downer. That students were impressed by these teachers is clearly evident in their reminiscences as alumnae, and so the teachers must be credited with playing a key role in the development of the "Milwaukee-Downer Woman." Teachers as role models -- along with college rituals and traditions that encouraged students to see themselves as growing into increasingly responsible roles -- may well have counteracted the brake on independence inherent in the rules and regulations that governed the college's daily life.
Part III: Milwaukee-Downer College, 1921-1964