Thoughts on Manhattanville?

Featherston
Thu, 17 Sep 2015 01:21:17 +0000

@ #6 - Son of a Manhattanville alumna here. By “challenges” in post #5, worldspirit is alluding to the school’s general downturn circa 1970. Through a combination of factors, Manhattanville suffered a steep decline in prestige from its mid-20th-century heyday. I’d identify these factors as:

Financial, financial, financial.

The moves both to coeducation and to secularization. While I don't think either is inherently good or bad, in Manhattanville's case I think they served to erode the college's unique identity as the crown jewel of Catholic women's education in America. In its day, Manhattanville rightly was known as “the Catholic Vassar.”

The move to coeducation by traditionally all-male schools such as Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth, Georgetown, and Notre Dame. This siphoned many talented young women away from traditionally elite women's colleges. Amongst elite women’s colleges, I’d argue that only Wellesley and Smith retain the same or nearly the same cachet that they had in, say, 1965. I don’t mean that as a dig at any of those schools as they exist today; I just mean to emphasize how highly people regarded them in the several decades prior to 1970.

The move of the campus from Manhattan to Purchase. This was a sound move in the short term, as the school avoided NYC's "Warriors"/"Escape from New York" phase, but it was a bad move in the long term. Manhattan is much cleaner and safer than in was in the '70s and '80s. Were it still there, Manhattanville would be reaping the benefits of its location (just as Columbia once again is).

To give you an idea of Manhattanville’s former prestige (warning: humble-brag forthcoming), my mother was a high school valedictorian and chose Manhattanville over Radcliffe (Harvard College being all-male in those days). My 2¢: Manhattanville at its peak was on par with the top half of the Seven Sisters and was the most prestigious Catholic school in the country, more prestigious than Georgetown and significantly more prestigious than Notre Dame (which still was in the process of ascending under the leadership of Fr. Hesburgh and Edmund Stephan). The comparison to Georgetown and ND isn’t entirely apt, since Manhattanville is a college whereas Georgetown and ND are kind of “tweener” schools, retaining some aspects of a liberal arts college but skewing heavily toward the research university end of the spectrum. But you get my meaning. Amongst educated people aged 70 and over, a Manhattanville degree carries a lot of weight.

I don’t intend any of this as a knock on the Manhattanville of today. It’s an improving school and is better than it was 20 or 30 years ago. I’m just trying to provide my take on some of its institutional history.