Bowing to a storm of protest from historians and other scholars, Bryn Mawr School backed down yesterday and said it would allow publication of a history of the school it suppressed two years ago.
In a letter sent by fax to the author, Andrea D. Hamilton, Bryn Mawr's trustee board placed one condition on publication: that readers be notified the book is "not an official or sanctioned history" of the school.
The decision to lift the ban was reached during a 3 1/2 -hour meeting of the trustees Thursday, said David M. Funk, board chairman. He declined to comment further, saying only, "The letter speaks for itself."
Hamilton, who lives in Dallas, sold the book to Johns Hopkins University Press in 1998, but the academic press canceled the contract in 2000 after Bryn Mawr threatened legal action, citing an agreement the young scholar signed in 1995 to gain access to school records. The agreement gives the school approval rights over any publication based on its records.
After stories about Hamilton's case appeared recently in The Sun and later in the Chronicle of Higher Education, more than 140 historians and other scholars and archivists petitioned Bryn Mawr to allow publication of Hamilton's work, which was written as a dissertation in history at Tulane University in New Orleans.
The signers, including three historians at the Johns Hopkins University, made it clear they were not judging Hamilton's work, but asking Bryn Mawr to hew to its "tradition of free and open inquiry."
Hamilton had been informed Monday that she would receive a decision yesterday. "I was so nervous," she said. "I couldn't just sit around the fax, so I went shopping." Her husband, Scott F. Wendorf, informed her of the decision by cell phone.
"I'm so pleased and relieved," said Hamilton, 35. "You know, I fought the battle alone and in the dark for a very long time."
Jim Jordan, director of the Hopkins Press, said, "We feel it's the appropriate outcome, and we would still like to publish the book."
Hamilton worked three years on the dissertation, which she successfully defended at Tulane. She spent another year revising the manuscript after passing the Hopkins Press' demanding approval process.
She hoped publication by a prestigious academic press would launch her career as an academic historian.
