In memoriam: Mills College, 1852-2023

El Campanil, The Oval, and Mills Hall on the Mills College campus. Image source: Mills College.

In late March I learned of the decision by the Board of Trustees of Mills College to "no longer enroll new first-year undergraduate students" and to confer its final degrees in 2023. [1]

This is devastating news. The primary mission of Mills College since its founding in 1852 has been the education of women. Although some may believe that we have reached such a perfected state of gender equality that there is no longer a role for women's colleges, from personal experience I can assert the contrary. In the 1980s I taught science at Mills, and saw first-hand the benefits of women-only classrooms and labs. Many of my students had been discouraged from pursuing courses of study in science, technology, engineering, or mathematics (STEM). Such discouragement was common; even someone as talented as Jennifer Doudna, the 2020 co-recipient of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, was told by her high school guidance counselor around the time I started teaching at Mills that "girls don't do science." [2]

Despite the many strides that have been made since then, we have not yet achieved an educational system in which young women are treated as fully the equals of young men in STEM fields. One-third of undergraduate women who declare STEM majors switch to non-STEM majors, as opposed to only a quarter of men. STEM attrition has been linked "to such attitudinal factors as motivation, confidence, and beliefs about one's capacity to learn STEM subjects," as well as to "several course-related factors. . .including negative experiences encountered in gatekeeper or introductory math and science courses." [3]

In the science courses I taught at Mills I saw students grow in confidence and capability over the course of each semester. I sought to supply support and encouragement, and to provide my students with the tools to analyze and understand the problems we worked on together, and to apply those skills to solve new problems on their own. Mills has a highly diverse student body: more than half of Mills undergraduates identify as people of color, and half identify as LGBTQ. Many in my classes were first-generation college students, and some were single mothers returning to earn a degree after spending time in the workforce. I tried to create a culture of learning in my classes that was welcoming and supportive of everyone.

At institutions at which I had been a teaching assistant before coming to Mills, introductory science courses were graded by policy on a strict curve that allowed only 15% of the students to receive an A. Grading on a curve pits student against student in a struggle for an artificially limited number of good grades. At my first grading conference as a TA I watched the lead instructor draw a line through a cluster of scores; those above the line got As, and those below the line (whose total scores over the course of the semester differed from some in the A group by as little as one point) got Bs. Then another line was drawn to separate the 20% of the students who would receive Bs from the majority who would receive Cs, Ds, or Fs. We could argue for individual students just below the lines who had some extraordinary circumstance that we were aware of (lengthy illness, family emergency, etc.), but not against the patent injustice of the system.

At Mills I had the freedom to grade my courses on an absolute scale announced at the beginning of the semester, and the flexibility at the end of the semester to adjust that scale (always in favor of the students) so that those who had demonstrated similar levels of understanding would receive similar grades. I also dropped each student's lowest score so that they weren't penalized for needing to deal with a crisis at work or care for a sick child. Letting the students know at the start that they were not competing against one another for grades, but instead that the object of the course was for everyone to succeed in understanding the material, fostered cooperation and peer-to-peer learning.

Over the decades the Mills College administration has shown itself to be drastically out of step with its own community. In the mid- to late-1980s the Board of Trustees resisted calls by faculty and students to divest from companies doing business in apartheid South Africa. You might think that an institution located in East Oakland would be especially sensitive to the injustices of racism, but it took six years before the Board finally made the right decision. [4] In 1990 the Board, acting without input from students and faculty, voted to end the identity of Mills as a women's college and admit men as undergraduates; after a two-week student strike garnering strong alumnae and faculty support, the Board rescinded its decision. [5] And in 2017 the Board declared a financial emergency (while apparently paying fees of $2.5 million annually for portfolio management providing below-market returns) and, again without consulting the Mills community, approved a plan eliminating academic programs and terminating tenured faculty. After an outpouring of support for the affected faculty and programs the Board scaled back but did not eliminate the planned cuts. [6]

Mills students during the 1990 strike. Image source: No Bad Language

Mills students, faculty and alumnae are now mobilizing on Facebook (Save Mills), Twitter (@save_mills), and Instagram (#savemills) to keep Mills a women's college. Plans have been announced by the Board and administration to create a Mills Institute to foster women's leadership. But every class at Mills College fosters women's leadership, and there's no reason that a Mills Institute can't coexist with the college. The Board of Trustees should listen to the Mills community once more and reverse the short-sighted decision to close the college. Institutions dedicated to the education and empowerment of women are needed now more than ever.

Update 20 June 2021: The president of Northeastern University has announced that he is currently in negotiations for Mills College to become a part of Northeastern. This is sweetbitter news: sweet because undergraduate programs would continue on the Mills campus, but bitter because Mills would lose its historic focus on women's education. You can read the announcement on the News@Northeastern blog.

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1. Elizabeth L. Hillman, "Mills Announces New Path for the College," March 17, 2021. https://www.mills.edu/announcement/index.php
2. Jennifer Doudna, quoted in Tor Haugen, "Life, gene editing, and rock ’n’ roll: 5 things we learned from Jennifer Doudna’s talk," Berkeley Library Update, November 15, 2017. https://update.lib.berkeley.edu/2017/11/15/doudna/
3. Xianglei Chen and Matthew Soldner, "STEM Attrition: College Students’ Paths Into and Out of STEM Fields: Statistical Analysis Report." National Center for Education Statistics, 2013. https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2014/2014001rev.pdf
4. Olivia Ensign, "Mills College students win divestment from South African apartheid government, 1984-1988," Global Nonviolent Action Database, 2009. https://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/mills-college-students-win-divestment-south-african-apartheid-government-1984-1988
5. Mary Lou Santovec, "Mills College Celebrates 20 Years After Student Strike." Women in Higher Education, 2014. https://doi.org/10.1002/whe.10049
6. Jeanita Lyman, "Mills proposes faculty, department cuts amid community outcry," The Campanil, June 15, 2017. http://www.thecampanil.com/mills-proposes-faculty-department-cuts-amid-community-outcry/