Newcomb College, Another Loss to New Orleans

It is a sad day for women's higher education in the South.

As part of a large reorganization, today Tulane University eliminated its undergraduate women's college, Newcomb College, in favor of a single college for all incoming students.

A part of New Orleans's identity we thought would always be there, like the ancient live oaks that shade its campus, Newcomb has been wiped away in the wake of Hurricane Katrina.

Newcomb College, my alma mater, that of my mother and grandmother, is gone.

For more than one hundred years, Newcomb College has been a leader in women's education. In 1886, Josephine Louise Newcomb founded the college in memory of her daughter H. Sophie Newcomb, who died in 1870 at age 15. Her mission was to make available to young women the same opportunity for a liberal education as was being offered to young men through Tulane's College of Arts and Sciences.

For decades, women in New Orleans and throughout the South who sought a liberal arts education, came to Newcomb.

The red-brick Broadway campus buildings set apart from Tulane's campus on St. Charles reinforced Newcomb's separate identity--a women's college within a larger university.

This model was adopted across the country, in the creation of Barnard College at Columbia University and Pembroke College at Brown University.

At Newcomb academic standards were rigorous, and its women took pride in their degrees. Alumnae took pride in being not just Tulane alums, but Newcomb graduates.

In my grandmother's day, Newcomb took the lead in women's physical education--at a time when exercise was not encouraged for women--and developed an arts program wherein women created the exceptional pottery for which Newcomb is famous.

In my mother's day, academics at Newcomb remained top-notch. Newcomb's separate faculty afforded my mother the an education in languages and classics to rival any of the best colleges in the country.

In my time at Newcomb, a women's college seemed less and less important. By that time, coeducational classes were the norm, and Newcomb's identity became more and more abstract. A logo, a memory.

But the traditions remained strong: Newcomb senate, a separate graduation ceremony for Newcomb, separate advisors. What remained was the importance of women's education.

When I walked among the oaks of Newcomb College in the 1980s, I used to think about Sophie Newcomb, the daughter of founder Josephine Louise Newcomb, who didn't live long enough to attend college, in whose memory the college was founded. Her brief life was the great sadness of her mother, and her legacy was this college for women.

Today as we all carry a great sadness for the losses our city has sustained and we search for meaning in our lives and in our uncertain futures, Tulane has added this additional blow.

As the downed oak branches are carted away and the campus wiped clean for the upcoming semester, I hope we don't forget Josephine Louise Newcomb's great gift to our city, and to the century of women who benefited from that gift. And I think of our future daughters who will never have an opportunity to attend Newcomb College.


Sarah Griffin Thibodeaux
Newcomb College Class of 1993