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Continued from previous page
Cinderblock walls and vinyl floors
Janice R. Bellace, CW'71, a longtime
faculty member in the Legal Studies
Department and former deputy dean
of the School, says there are many
things she remembers about Wharton
in the tumultuous 1960s and early
1970s, but the first thing that comes
to mind is the old Dietrich Hall.
"It had these pale green cinderblock
walls and vinyl tile floors," she says.
"You looked down long corridors and
went into classrooms where seats were
bolted to the floor and the professors
were at the front of the room on platforms.
Even by the late '60s, the building
seemed old fashioned."
More than a few alumni echoed
Bellace's remarks about the aesthetically
challenged nature of Wharton's physical
facilities. Michelle Smith, W'96,
remembers the first time that she,
accompanied by four girlfriends,
took a stroll on Locust Walk. She
was not impressed. "I said, 'Oh,
that's it?'" Whereas Steinberg Hall-Dietrich
Hall struck Smith as functional,
Vance Hall seemed to her a
bit of a "dinosaur." "I thought it was
a temporary building and that the
plan was ultimately to build something
else," she says.
"When you compare our school
to others, one of the big things is that
other schools have established business
campuses," says Richard Murray-Bruce,
WG'02. "Harvard Business
School's architecture is similar. It's all
self-enclosed, which promotes a concentrated
culture. Wharton didn't have
that. There wasn't a great place to meet
on campus. That's a subtle thing, but
it created a fractured environment that
will change radically when Huntsman
Hall opens. Huntsman will create a
central place to meet, and that will
change how people feel about coming
to Wharton."
A few good women
Bellace, who earned a law degree from
Penn and a master's degree from the
London School of Economics, also
remembers being "the only girl" in
her accounting class. At a time when
women were wearing miniskirts, she
recalls being the only student in that
class to be asked to write on the blackboard.
"Women could not wear slacks
prior to 1970," she says. "There was a
dress code for both men and women,
and I was the only woman. At the time
I felt self-conscious."
But it was a male teacher, Alan
Choate, who saw that Bellace had
promise and encouraged her to enroll
in law school. She
also was befriended
by another faculty
member, Fred
Kempin, who was
the vice dean and
director of the
Undergraduate
Division and taught
a course in business
law. "Fred later hired
me [to teach his
comparative Anglo-American
law course
when he was on leave in the fall of
1977] and told me I was the only student
of his he ever hired."
Edvige Barrie, WG'76, also recalls
how it felt to be a young woman in an
environment dominated by young men.
"There was a two-week course you
had to take if you didn't have a strong
background in Fortran programming,
something we all use today on a daily
basis," says Barrie, whose nickname is
pronounced "Veej." "In Fortran, I
could barely understand what we were
doing. There was an inventory problem
I was trying to solve in our group.
I was the only female. I said, 'We
should do ABC, and that will solve
the problem.' There was no reaction.
Five minutes later, a male member
said, 'We should do ABC,' and everybody
said, 'Great idea!' What it
showed me was they couldn't hear me
because I was female and had been
discounted. That happened on more
than one occasion in life, not just at
Wharton. I didn't feel I had to fight
any great discrimination battle, but I
had to fight a bias based on gender."
Bruce Hoffman, W'66, says there
may have been fewer than a half dozen
women at Wharton during the early
1960s. Hoffman recalls meeting
one student who told him "she was
an only child, and her father had a
business, and he wanted her to find
a husband."
For his part, Curley does not
remember a single woman in any of
his classes in the early 1950s.
In the old Dietrich Hall, an observant
person could indirectly deduce
the absence of women students – the
original bathrooms on the ground
floor were for men only.
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