On one of those warm days last week, Bryn Mawr, a North Baltimore private school for girls, had the look of a British school in the tropics. The wide doors of the Gordon Building, a rambling mansion now housing school offices, were thrown open to gentle late-summer breezes. Girls and young women, dressed in white blouses and blue-green skirts, gathered in small groups to eat lunch outside. Only the palms were missing.
On this, the second day of school, there was a sense of excitement and of possibility. At a morning convocation, Joshua Shoemaker, chairman of the school's fine and performing arts department, explained the ground rules of the regular get-togethers for middle- and upper-schoolers.
By May, each senior will have presided over one convocation -- an exercise in public speaking long since abandoned by most schools.
Rebecca MacMillan Fox also was in her second day as head of an independent school. A scholar of French literature who has been in higher education administration for more than two decades -- most recently as dean of William Smith College in Geneva, N.Y. -- she has made an unusual career move down a few grades.
She thinks it's a natural move, one just right for her. A student -- and champion -- of women's education, Dr. Fox said she would continue that interest at the all-female Bryn Mawr. Then, too, there is the recoupling, at least in spirit, of the Baltimore prep school and Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania, where Dr. Fox, 47, earned three degrees (bachelor's, master's and doctor of philosophy) and worked for a decade as assistant dean.
The Baltimore school was founded as a "feeder" school for the college of the same name, but that connection dissolved decades ago, and Bryn Mawr College recruited not a single graduate from Bryn Mawr School this fall.
You don't have to go far on the Bryn Mawr campus to find the names of M. Carey Thomas, Mary Garrett and the other "rebels" -- Dr. Fox's word -- who loom large in Bryn Mawr's and Baltimore's history.
She was attracted to Bryn Mawr, Dr. Fox said, "by a curriculum that incorporates the values of a classical education." Bryn Mawr still requires Latin of middle-schoolers, a tradition that goes back to Edith Hamilton, the classical scholar who was the school's first headmistress.
