In his charge to a committee seek- ing a new dean of women in the year after World War II ended, Chancellor Robert House ’ 16 drew a line from Wordsworth: “Your job is simple; find ‘a perfect
woman, nobly planned.’ ”
The search turned up one Katherine
Kennedy Carmichael, of an old Birming-
ham, Ala., family, in her 34th year, a graduate
of Birmingham Southern College with a
master’s and doctorate from Vanderbilt, where
her father’s first cousin was chancellor. She
was done with high school at 15, college
at 19. She had taught dirt-poor children in
her home state, then in a private school in
Dallas, and at Western Maryland College and
the University of Wisconsin. During those
summers she had studied at SMU, Johns
Hopkins, Colorado, and Peabody College.
If she wasn’t nobly planned by then, she
certainly seemed to have noble plans. Over
her 31-year career she would elevate herself to the first rank nationally in her profession, the business of in loco parentis —
protecting young ladies from the temptations waiting on a college campus — but
also the business of shepherding young
women along the path to full participation
in higher education.
At once ahead of her time and madden-
ingly behind it, Carmichael kept Carolina’s
first female students on edge with an
uncompromising set of social rules that
came with dire consequences, and in the
1960s she stayed too long under their spell.
At 10-year intervals starting in 1951, she
used a Fulbright fellowship to teach Eng-
lish in the Philippines — the Japanese had
abolished study of the language in 1942;
she taught in Saigon, where she could hear
the bombs of war from her apartment; and,
in her late 50s, she again left the dean’s
office in the hands of assistants to spend a
semester at Yale — joking that she was
working on her resume.
