Dean of Women
University Administration
Biography/Memoir
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 occupants 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 declared, “has given her a penetrating insight into human nature and 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 continue 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 Columbia 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, Connecticut, Miss Bacon attended St. Timothy’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 following 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 University 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