Have no fear, folks

Knew you'd be glad to hear, folks

We're under lock and key,

We've got security.

This verse form a dormitory song at Mount Holyoke College reflects, unfortunately, a great deal about this 125-year old women's college.

Mount Holyoke is located in South Hadley, Mass.-about 90 miles from Boston-in the Connecticut River Valley, which also contains the University of Massachusetts, Smith, and Amherst. Despite the proximity of these other schools, Holyoke suffers from a genuine case of isolation. The village of South Hadley is a quasi-mythical entity; it contains the College Inn, where you can go for a cup of coffee between classes; and Gleseman's Drug store, where you can go for a cup of coffee between classes. That's about all, and the neighboring city of Holyoke is not much more lively. Public transportation is notoriously insufficient, and any boy who goes to Mount Holyoke for a date without a car may well find himself stranded in South Hadley for a week end with little to do but take a long walk in the woods. Even communication tends to isolate Mount Holyoke; one girl ruefully noted that Amherset boys frequently prefer Smith girls because "it costs ten cents to call Northampton, but Holyoke is a forty-cent long distance call."

Mount Holyoke's geographic isolation has inevitably affected the social life of the college. Girls at Mount Holyoke primarily date boys from Yale, Dartmouth, Amherst, and Williams (though many look upon Amherst with contempt and Dartmouth with suspicion). Harvard is not a major source of dates. ("After all, you've got Radcliffe," a girl commented.) Because of Mount Holyoke's separation from men's colleges, social life is strictly a weekend activity; since they are not in frequent contact with boys, many girls-especially freshmen-must rely heavily on blind dates to meet boys.

Almost inevitably, girls eventually become quite dissatisfied with blind dates-they are generally enveloped by an aura of phoniness, superficiality, and a unnatural intensity. "I doubt that there is such a thing as a relaxed blind date," a girl observed. The unpopularity of blind dates and the general contempt for mixtures make many girls who are socially inclined feel that having a steady boyfriend is almost imperative at Mount Holyoke. One girl took a rather cynical view of the function of boys in Mount Holyoke's world: "Boys are primarily a means for getting out of Holyoke for a weekend."

Geographic isolation has proved to be one of the major formative factors of the character of Mount Holyoke, and the clash of urban and urbane girls with the "country college" setting has been one of the greatest sources of students' discontent with the school.

Dissatisfaction

Quite apart from the school's isolation, however, there is an abnormal amount of unrest among the girls at Mount Holyoke, and the causes of the discontent are frequently inscrutable to the outsider and even perplexing to the girls themselves. But the majority of girls at Mount Holyoke do go through a phase of seriously considering transfer to another college.

The source of the dissatisfaction is most decidedly not the college's academic quality. Mount Holyoke is unquestionably one of the finest and most rigorous women's colleges in the country. Probably its grates academic asset is the genuinely close contact that students have with faculty members; all of Mount Holyoke's classes are small by Harvard standards. Furthermore, the College offers numerous seminars and a liberal independent study program in which even freshmen may regularly participate.

This close personal attention extends past the academic side of life at Mount Holyoke. One girl, describing a geology professor, illustrated this close faculty student contact: "I hardly know him; I've never taken a geology course in my life and I don't plan to; yet he's the type of person that I could just walk into his office and say 'I have a problem' and he'd do whatever he could."

Mount Holyoke recently announced sweeping revisions in its academic structure to take effect next fall. Intended to give students greater "intellectual repose and opportunity to concentrate," the primary change is a switch from the five-course schedule. The school has also altered its general education courses to make possible the completion of its massive general education requirements by the middle of the sophomore year.

Mount Holyoke is also participating in another even more significant academic innovation. Since 1956 an increased sharing of resources has evolved among Mount Holyoke, UMass, Smith, and Amherst. Through this cooperation, joint departments and programs have been established, and girls may take courses in any of the other schools which are not offered by their own school. This has the obvious advantage of broadening the potential fields of study open to girls at Mount Holyoke, whose course offering are necessarily limited because of the college's size.