Assistant Professor of English

Dean of Women

Deborah Bacon will arrive in
 Ann Arbor next week to assume 
her new responsibilities as the University's fifth Dean of Women. 


Miss Bacon succeeds the late Dean
 Alice C. Lloyd, '16, who died last
 March after filling the post for almost 
a quarter-century. Previous occu
pants of the important position were
 Eliza M. Mosher, '75m, from 1896 to
 1902; Myra B. Jordan, '93, from 1902 
to 1922; and Jean Hamilton, from
 1922 to 1926.


To her new office Miss Bacon brings
 an unusual background of experience
 with people. "Her work in psychiatric nursing, in social welfare and public
 health," Provost James P. Adams de
clared, "has given her a penetrating 
insight into human nature and a 
breadth of human understanding. She 
will also bring to her work the intellectual interests of a scholar and a
 lively interest in the academic work
 of students. Under Miss Bacon, the
 office of the Dean of Women will con
tinue to have an identity of its own
 within the administrative structure of
 the University."


Until recently the new Dean has 
been a student herself, on the graduate 
level, and she has just completed work 
on her doctoral dissertation at Colum
bia University. For the past two
 years she has held a fellowship from 
the American Council of Learned Societies, which has enabled her to spend
 six months in research in England on
 her thesis problem, a study of the
 psychoanalytical approach to nonsense
 literature.


A native of New Haven, Connecti
cut, Miss Bacon attended St. Timo
thy's School in Baltimore, and entered
 nurses' training at Bellevue Hospital
 in New York in 1930. In 1936 she
 went to Fort Yukon, Alaska, with an
 Episcopal missionary hospital. Upon 
return to the United States the fol
lowing year, she enrolled at New York
 University and in 1941 received the
 degree of Bachelor of Science in education (public health). In 1940-41 she served as Superintendent of Nurses in an Oneida, Kentucky, Hospital project directed by the U. S. Public Health Service


From 1942 to 1946, the new Dean was in the Army Nurse Corps. Her unit, an evacuation hospital attached to the Third Army, landed at Omaha
 Beach and served through France,
 Germany and Czechoslovakia.


After the close of the European
 war, Miss Bacon attended classes at 
the Sorbonne in Paris for ten weeks. 
 She then enrolled at Columbia Uni
versity Graduate School to pursue
 studies in English literature, her field
 of academic specialization. In 1948 
she received the Master of Arts degree
 with first class honors, writing her 
thesis on the poetry of John Donne.

The Michigan Alumnus, October 7, 1950, Page 7