Category Archives: Education

Alice Gustava Smith

Alice Gustava Smith, better known by her students and readers as Sister Maris Stella, taught English at the College of St. Catherine (now St. Catherine University) in St. Paul for nearly fifty years. During that time she also published books of verse that built her reputation as a skilled and spiritual poet.

Smith was born in Alton, Iowa, in 1899. During her junior year in high school she moved to St. Paul to attend Derham Hall High School. At that time, Derham Hall was located on the campus of the College of St. Catherine.

Smith graduated from Derham Hall in 1918. Two years later she entered the novitiate of the Sisters of St. Joseph and took the name Sister Maris Stella. In 1924 she received her undergraduate degree from the College of St. Catherine with majors in English and music. Shortly after receiving her degree, she became a faculty member of the college.

Sister Maris Stella’s career took off when she sailed to England and earned her master’s degree in English at the University of Oxford. Soon after returning from Europe she became a star in the English Department at St. Catherine’s. She loved teaching and became a popular creative writing teacher as well as a poet-in-residence.

In 1939, Sister Maris Stella published her first volume of poetry, Here Only a Dove. During the 1940s she continued to write poetry for magazines. The English poet and novelist Alfred Noyes included a dozen of her poems in The Golden Book of Catholic Poetry, an anthology he edited in 1946.

By the end of the decade, Sister Maris Stella had published her second volume of poetry, Frost for St. Bridget. A nature lover, she linked the Irish St. Bridget with the frost in bleak trees, where, as she wrote in one poem, “Under the moon the orchards bloomed with hoarfrost, the white hills lay pale.”

During this poetically creative period, Sister Maris Stella continued to teach English at the College of St. Catherine. For almost twenty years she also served as chairperson of the school’s English Department. She enjoyed teaching literature, the history of the language, and, especially, creative writing. With such a busy schedule, she found less and less time to write her own poetry.

Then, in the early 1950s, the poet, novelist, and memoirist May Sarton visited the college as a Phi Beta Kappa lecturer. After Sarton returned home, she started a fellowship program for writers like Sister Maris Stella who had little time to travel and write. Sarton believed that writers often suffered from “divine discontent” when they lacked time for creative work.

Sister Maris Stella was surprised and pleased to receive a grant that allowed her to participate in Sarton’s program during the 1958–1959 academic year. She traveled to the Southwest, where she wrote poetry in a desert landscape markedly different from Minnesota’s. Several of these new poems were later published by North Central Publishing Company in a special Christmas edition.

Another highlight in Sister Maris Stella’s career was a collaboration with Paul Fetler, a music professor and composer from the University of Minnesota. Fetler wrote a cantata inspired by her poem “The Veil and the Rock.” The first performance of the cantata was held at the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis.

After serving in the English Department at St. Catherine’s for close to fifty years, Sister Maris Stella retired from active teaching in May 1971. By then, she had returned to using her birth name, Alice Gustava Smith. It was under this name that St. Catherine’s Alumnae Association published her Collected Poems in 1982. The book included several new poems as well as poetry selected from earlier volumes.

Sister Alice died in 1987. Although she suffered from ill health toward the end of her life, she is remembered for her acceptance of aging and her spiritual outlook on life. Her colleagues often quoted her poem “Joseph of Dreams,” which includes the line, “in that last hour be a great light.” They agreed she herself was a great light for others, especially young women writers, for whom she was a strong guide.

Continue reading

Dr Doris Honig Merritt

1978: Dr. Doris H. Merritt was the first woman to chair the Board of Regents for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, where she was instrumental in establishing the library’s electronic information system.

Inspiration
I was being discharged from the U.S. Navy after World War II and wanted an interesting and useful profession that would allow me to live independently.

Biography
Doris Honig Merritt, M.D., the first woman to chair the Board of Regents for the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, helped establish the Library’s electronic information system in 1978. During her career in university administration, Dr. Merritt coined the term “grantsmanship” to describe the art of procuring grants, and herself brought millions of dollars in grants to the Indiana University School of Medicine and the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis.

As World War II was coming to a close in the mid 1940s, so was young Doris Merritt’s two-year stint in the Navy Officer Corps. As she looked for an interesting job alternative, an interesting and useful profession that would give her some measure of financial independence, she decided on medicine. She had graduated cum laude with a Phi Beta Kappa in English literature from Hunter College of the University of the City of New York in 1944, and had to take pre-medical courses from 1946 to 1948 before she was accepted into medical school at The George Washington University School of Medicine. When she earned her doctor of medicine in 1952, she and her physician husband Donald Merritt went to Duke University for residencies—she in pediatrics, he in internal medicine. She was an assistant resident in pediatrics at Duke University from 1954 to 1955, and a fellow in pediatrics from 1955 to 1956.

Dr. Doris Merritt came to be a high-powered fundraiser for academic medicine almost by accident. “I was introduced to administration simply by following my husband, which women were expected to do then. ” When her husband took a position at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland in 1957, Dr. Doris Merritt didn’t find work in pediatrics, her specialty. Instead, she found a new career. Dr. Merritt took a position as an executive secretary for the Division of Research Grants at the National Institutes of Health. Through this introduction to grants work, Dr. Merritt realized she could serve as an effective facilitator, and that she loved to watch the progress of different projects. She devoted the next forty years to “grantsmanship”—a term she coined in the 1960s to describe successful approaches to fundraising for research.

In 1961, Dr. Merritt accompanied her husband to the Indiana University School of Medicine in Indianapolis, where she was named director of medical research grants and contracts. Instead of reviewing grants applications as she had done at the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Merritt directed applications. She was very successful: two of the project grants received by Indiana University School of Medicine (IUSM) that Dr. Merritt secured in her first year as director were still ongoing more than thirty-five years later.

The following year, when Dr. Merritt became assistant dean for medical research at Indiana University School of Medicine, she was one of the first women in the United States to be assistant dean of a coeducational medical school. Between 1961 and 1978, Dr. Merritt was instrumental in bringing $55 million in new construction grants to the Indianapolis campus. From 1961 to 1997, under her guidance, IUSM research dollars grew from $1.8 million to nearly $105 million.

In 1978, Dr. Merritt returned to Bethesda and was appointed special assistant to the director of the National Institutes of Health for research training and research resources. In 1978, she was the first woman to chair the National Library of Medicine Board of Regents, Dr. Merritt helped create the library’s electronic information system. In 1986, she was named the first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research of the National Institutes of Health.

Following her husband’s death, Dr. Merritt returned home to Indiana and in 1988, became dean of the Indiana University School of Medicine. She also held positions as interim dean of the Purdue School of Engineering and Technology, and vice chancellor for research and graduate education at Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis. After officially retiring in 1998, Dr. Merritt served on the Indiana University School of Medicine’s National Center for Women’s Health and the Women’s Fund of Central Indiana. She also designed and created databases for student research in drama, short stories, and biography as a volunteer for the North Central High School.

After 1994, three schools of the Indiana University-Purdue University at Indianapolis designated annual honors, awards, and lectureships in Dr. Merritt’s name. Dr. Merritt also received the National Institutes of Health Director’s Award and the Governor of Indiana’s “Sagamore of the Wabash” citation. While proud of all this recognition, Dr. Merritt said, “In some respects, I have been most touched by the Certificate of Recognition I was awarded by the Washington Township School Board for the volunteer work I have done in the North Central High School Information Center. The staff has been wonderful in allowing me the privilege of working there at my own speed for the past three years, and I will continue to do so as long as I have the energy and wit to function productively.”

Question and Answer
What was my biggest obstacle?
Because my bachelor of arts degree was in literature and philosophy, I had to make up two years of pre-medical requirements.

How do I make a difference?
I helped by advising and mentoring countless individual investigators and trainees and by keeping the administrative rails greased in my positions as dean and vice chancellor at Indiana University-Purdue University, Indianapolis and as research training officer and first acting director of the National Center for Nursing Research at the NIH. Now I make a difference by consulting and serving on community boards and in a local high school as well as at the Indiana University School of Medicine.

Who was my mentor?
There were no mentors fifty years ago.

How has my career evolved over time?
After receiving my boards in pediatrics, I became involved in federal research administration at the National Institutes of Health, as well as in academic research administration at Indiana University. Opportunities continued to arise that advanced me through the ranks to distinguished university professor with honorary degrees from both Purdue and Indiana Universities.

Continue reading

Elizabeth M Humbargar

Educator and humanitarian. Raised in Salina, Kansas, Elizabeth Humbargar (1903–89) and her sister Catherine (1901–96) became teachers and moved to California in the 1920s, both ended up at Stockton High School in the 1930s, where she taught English and her sister math. Drawn to the Asian American students, Elizabeth became the faculty adviser of the 400-member Japanese American student club and encouraged and cajoled many Nisei to pursue college. When local Japanese Americans were forcibly sent to the Stockton Assembly Center, the Humbargar sisters worked to make sure their students were able to continue their educations, recruiting college students to teach classes there, venturing to the camp every day after school to counsel the student teachers and provide curricular materials and spare textbooks. After the inmates were transferred to the more permanent concentration camp in Rohwer, Arkansas, the sisters remained in touch and wrote an estimated 500 letters of recommendation to facilitate resettlement, college admission, and employment of their friends and former students. When Japanese Americans were allowed to return to Stockton in 1945, they opened their homes to serve as temporary lodging for former students and their families. Elizabeth helped to reestablish the local Japanese American Citizens League (JACL) chapter and remained active in the community after the war. She went on to become a pioneering figure in English as a second language teaching and taught and served as a guidance counselor at San Joaquin Delta College, retiring in 1969. She was honored with an endowed JACL scholarship in her name, awarding the first scholarship in the amount of $500 herself in June 1970. She was also honored by the Japanese government (1978) and by San Joaquin County (1981). In 2012, San Joaquin Delta College established the Elizabeth Humbargar Tolerance Garden and the Elizabeth Humbargar Counseling Center.

Continue reading

Ella C Evanson

Middle school teacher to many Nisei in the Seattle area. A longtime teacher at George Washington School in Seattle, Ella C. Evanson (1890–1986), collected the writings of her Japanese American students before and after their confinement in American concentration camps during World War II. A native of North Dakota, she began her teaching career there. After serving as a clerk in the office of the adjutant general of the army in Washington, DC, during World War I, she moved to Washington state, where she began teaching in 1926. After teaching at B. F. Day Elementary in Seattle, she moved to Washington middle school in 1928, teaching 7th and 8th graders there until retiring in 1956. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Evanson encouraged her students to write about their feelings and continued to collect their writings after they were forcibly removed. The student writings were eventually donated to the University of Washington. Yook K. Pak’s 2002 book, Wherever I Go, I Will Always Be a Loyal American: Schooling Seattle’s Japanese Americans During World War II, is based on Evanson’s collection. She died in January 1986 at the age of 88.

Continue reading

Martha Nishitani

Martha Nishitani was a Seattle modern dance teacher and choreographer, and one of the leading proponents of modern dance in the Pacific Northwest.

Continue reading

Royal Alley-Barnes

An accomplished painter and muralist, her background in the arts framed her response to problems as varied as how to reduce youth violence, protect the environmental quality of the Mercer Island Slough, and improve the financial viability of Seattle city-owned arts facilities.

Continue reading