In looking over available source material for a requested brief biography of Virginia Alice Cottey Stockard, Cottey College's founder, this writer found himself drawn less to the notion of a straightforward life-story than to an appraisal of the broader subject: the field this woman and her school epitomized in her day, and above all how that day contrasts with ours.

What first strikes the researcher is Alice Cottey's sincere piety, her strict moral standards, which as a matter of course she imposed on her school. While we may recognize, intellectually, that Victorian times were "more religious," "more moral" than our own, still detailed evidence of just how truly this was the case can come as a surprise, even a shock.

Most colleges and universities, even the youngest, were founded by churches or religious leaders. By the late 19th century secularism, which would triumph in the 20th, already was making inroads in Academe. Yet on the surface the link between faith and higher learning seemed as firm as ever. Many people still lived lives wholly centered about their Christian faith. (As many do even today, of course; though they've become rather the exceptions.)

And the idea still reigned, even for males, that the primary purpose of schooling wasn't to impart knowledge but rather to develop character, to turn out not eggheads but "ladies" and "gentlemen." Inevitably this meant stressing manners and morals, the socially decorative arts, not the dully practical sciences. In Virginia Alice Cottey's youth, a lucky girl might spend a little time in a strictly sex-segregated "seminary" or "finishing school." And a "finished" (socially "polished") young lady was one who'd dabbled in, say, "music, dancing, French, and embroidery."

Even Cottey, which early offered "truly an ambitious program" including Latin, French or German, trigonometry, chemistry, English literature, astronomy, etc., would go on pushing "sewing and other domestic arts" as "adequate for the education of women."

Inevitably, domesticity loomed large in a "house" that needed a lot of housekeeping, lacking as it did running water, indoor plumbing, central heating, or electric lighting. Boarding pupils lived four to a room, faculty in pairs, and all were expected to pull their weight at the lone sink in the hall, the coal stoves and coal-oil lamps, and the outdoor "Congress," as they termed the toilet.

They also had to make and tend their own uniforms, floor-length skirts, plain black wool for winter, over itchy long underwear and long stockings always in need of darning, with a black hat; for summer easily soiled pastel, with a white bonnet.

Time and energy left over from this "practical" regimen was easily accounted for by courses in "deportment," in which young ladies learned how to be ladies, by unlearning long lists of "unladylike" gestures and postures.

Such courses were intended as anything but guides to courtship, or even socializing as we now see it. Alice Cottey might have been an intellectual pioneer but certainly she wasn't a moral one. As late as World War I, with Nevada awash in soldiers, Cottey girls still weren't allowed to have dates, or dance, even with each other. Shopping and other errands took place only in groups with. chaperones. On Sundays the student body was marched to church with almost military discipline, to reinforce the mandatory thrice-daily prayers and mealtime graces.

Moore's Opera House was a bastion of local "culture" in Cottey's early years; but Cottey girls dreamt in vain of ever darkening its doors. "Going to the theatre is a questionable pastime," Alice Cottey decreed. (The play being discussed was, of all things, "Uncle Tom's Cabin.") "The people who give the play are for the most part immoral."

Ironically this is the traditional view, held by all "decent people" through most of history. Only in the past century have entertainer celebrities emerged as heroes and role models and their unabashed "immorality" come to be celebrated ad nauseum.

Though Alice Cottey never knowingly let her girls go to that immoral sink, the theatre, at last she did let the theatre come to them, more or less. The Bard was heady controversial stuff to Victorians. When Cottey students at long, long last were allowed to stage intramural productions of Shakespeare, the girls playing male parts still had to wear skirts! Artistic verisimilitude must have been as grotesquely strained as the distinction between the sexes.

Sports, too, called for Alice Cottey's moral vigilance. In 1892 she misgivingly let tennis courts be built, though she much preferred croquet, "such a genteel game.

The trouble with tennis was, it left too much room for those "unladylike" gestures. Even in their coverup, dresses and sailor hats "there was nothing pretty about them as they whacked the balls with good masculine strokes." (Can't you just hear the feminists" toothgnashing thoughts?) "Tennis would degrade women. It was definitely a man's sport."

Times they were a-changing, but Alice Cottey was holding the line as best she could, like many others as the "Roaring Twenties" dawned. Secularism was tightening its hold on colleges and universities, and fundamentalist religion was taking its first blundering steps at fighting back, as e.g. in the Dayton, Tenn., "monkey trial." The fight's still going on, with a more sophisticated fundamentalism at least holding its own, as at present over in Kansas.

Alice Cottey voiced concern for "the religious atmosphere, which she must keep as a part of the daily life of the school: the foundation, on which all the rest depended."

One can't help wondering what she'd think if she came back. And the present writer's no more qualified to comment on her school's latterday moral and metaphysical climate than Alice's ghost! It's to be hoped the inscription over the chapel entrance, "In All Thy Ways Acknowledge Him" (Proverbs 3:6), is more than lip-service to Alice's vision.

But it can't be denied that much has changed!

Imagine a contemporary Cottey girl sneaking in from (gasp!) seeing a male, to be pounced on and told her belongings were packed, she could take herself straight off to the depot, back to her desolated parents! 0 tempora! 0 mores!

The difference overall is nothing less, it would seem, than the triumph of absolute individualism, that problematical fruit of the 1960s. It's now taken for granted that an individual's life is absolutely nobody's business but his or her own, society has no rightful interest in it. Schools exist not to mold character, according to an accepted and coherent worldview (the Christian one), but simply to offer the autonomous individual a smorgasbord of "subjects."