The History of Barat College

Barat College is observing the 100th Anniversary of its move to Lake Forest in 2004. Throughout its history, first as a boarding school, then as a women’s college, and finally as a coeducational institution, it has inherited and implemented a tradition of highly personalized education, tailored to each student’s strengths and weaknesses, yet holistic in its emphasis on the total person, caring for both material and spiritual well-being.

Early Days
Barat’s stylish, red-brick Old Main building is an awe inspiring structure today, but imagine its impact upon the religious and the first 22 children who entered in 1904. The land consisted of 45 acres of forest preserves with no other building nearby. Why did only 22 small children and 23 RSCJ need such a huge facility? Clearly, the founders had a much grander future in mind. Proving them right, the number of students reached 100 within just a few months of opening.

Early records show a spirited correspondence among Mother Fox, the contractor, and the architect over cost projections and concerns when carpenters’ wages rose from 35 cents to 45 cents an hour. Construction stopped for a year when funds ran out. Austerity moved Mother Fox to build without any provision for hot water, save for a small bath area (later to become the Ceramics Lab and today’s Sophie’s Bistro). The architect, Charles Prindiville, argued in vain for hot water throughout the building. Years later, he was asked the cost of installing such a system. “I have a confession to make,” Prindiville told Mother Superior. “The pipes are already there. I put them in anyway.” In the final days before opening, the religious followed the workmen from attic to basement, sweeping and sandpapering the floors. The workmen, their feet wrapped with felt cloth, skated up and down and polished the floors.

1955

A graduate of Barat’s commencement in 1920 wrote of boarding school life with a few “collegiate” features. She describes off-campus excursions to Chicago, the first dance – in a study hall with desks removed – and a graduation ceremony where the class of three wore corsages of sweetpeas on their academic gowns. Anna May Hawekotte Smith, Class of ‘38, once described another Barat memory: at 7:00 a.m. each morning, Mother Lambin woke each student by sprinkling them with holy water. Any girl who dallied in getting up for Mass got a full dousing.

Another student of that era recalled an air of contentment among students. There were walks along Lake Michigan, trips into town for hot buns and three to four trips into Chicago each year. Much time was spent talking about books and forming great friendships.

From the 1920s to the 1940s, students wore uniforms of blue serge and then brown tweed to class. Evening dinner was a dress-up affair. Lay “housemothers” stood at the dining room entrance to make sure heels and hose were worn. All meals were prepared by the religious. “Lights out” was at 10:00 p.m., though the religious knew the lights went on again soon after for late night snacks, studying, or a secret game of bridge. Housemothers practiced St. Madeleine Sophie’s advice: “See everything, but wink at most of it.”

Barat had little contact with the Lake Forest community in the early years. Students were allowed out one day a week and the religious lived a cloistered existence (a condition that prevailed until the mid-1960s). After Barat became a four-year college in 1918, the institution identified itself more with the village.  The first senior class solicited ads from Western Avenue merchants for their news magazine.  The “Green Teapot” and the counter at Krafft’s Drug Store became favorite haunts of the girls for the 1930s. Later, Barat student teachers began to serve in the area’s elementary and secondary public schools.  The college and the town initially moved along parallel tracks but, in recent years, they have converged and now intersect more and more. 

An Education of Leadership and Service
Over the years, its excellent academic reputation and prime location gave Barat what Anna May Hawekotte Smith termed a “snob school” appeal for Catholic, particularly Irish Catholic, families. Young mothers of the 1940s and 1950s where known to enroll their daughters at birth as future students.

A story in  the Chicago Tribune said, “There was, for a long time, something about being a Barat College graduate, something almost identifiable even years after graduation. ‘Girls who came out of Barat,’ says a woman who did not, ‘have a certain confidence just because they went to an upper class Catholic school. They all have this confidence – even when they shouldn’t.’”

Yet, true to St. Madeleine Sophie’s educational ideals, every upper class student paying the full freight was countered with a less privileged girl admitted on scholarship.

Barat has always sought to instill an attitude of service in its students. This enabled Barat to feel and respond to the impact of national and international events throughout its history. During World War II, students volunteered in the Red Cross activities and U.S.O. centers. General Douglas MacArthur stopped at Barat on his final U.S. tour and received flowers from a Japanese student.

Barat’s commitment to international education flourished after the war with the college welcoming students from Europe, the Far East and emerging African nations.

Political Science majors have found distinction in state and local political offices. Among Barat graduates are a former Illinois State Representative, the late Jeanne Hurley Simon ‘'43, wife of the late Senator Paul Simon; the first elected Chicago alderwoman, Mary Lou McCarthy Hedlund von Ferstel ‘'59, and Chicago's first woman mayor, Jane Byrne ‘'55.

Through the years, Barat students have been concerned with social issues. Students were involved in tutoring inner-city kids. A group of faculty and students headed south in 1965 to join the Selma, Alabama civil rights march. Students protested against the Vietnam War. They also participated in several Great Society programs, particularly Upward Bound, an attempt to prepare disadvantaged youth for college. Barat’s program was nationally recognized for its effectiveness.

Barat was the first college in Lake County and one of the first nationally to establish a Child Care Center on campus in 1972, allowing mothers to return to school and be assured of quality care for their children. The center operated for over twenty years.

n 1982, Barat started the Learning Opportunities Program, a nationally recognized support program to assist and guide students with documented learning disabilities towards a successful completion of their college degree. That same year, a study was started to document the effectiveness of this program, and survey how graduates with learning disabilities adapt professionally and personally to life after graduation. The study is the longest running of its kind worldwide.

Outward Expansion and Inward Change
During the 1950s and 1960s, Barat experienced the greatest surge of construction in its history. Conrad Hilton endowed the Hilton Center, which included a gymnasium, small theater and lounge (1955); other donors assisted with the construction of Stuart Dining Hall and Conference Center (1956); the Merrill and Dougherty Residence Halls (1963 and 1967); the Drake Theater (1965) and the Cuneo Science Building (1965). The next major construction on campus did not occur until 1995, when the college broke ground for the Sr. Madeleine Sophie Cooney Library behind Old Main.

Such bricks and mortar, a staple at many institutions, came hard at Barat. The RSCJs were not trained in finance but focused their thinking on providing a strong education. The college was run on a strictly year-to-year basis and the religious aimed to end each June in the black, sometimes by as little as a few hundred dollars. Such an approach did not take into account the reality of needing an endowment to provide for a rainy day.

A decline in the number of traditional, four-year resident students, combined with a nationwide attack on the role of separate women’s colleges, placed a heavy strain on the budget. Barat seemed to lose its way momentarily as the number of Sacred Heart faculty dropped sharply. Recognizing that administrative changes had to be made, the College became independent and installed a primarily lay board in 1969.

In 1982, Barat College became a co-educational institution. Through all these significant changes, the school has maintained the founding vision of St. Madeleine Sophie Barat to offer a highly personalized education tailored to each student’s strengths while caring for the intellectual and spiritual well-being of the total person.

The DePaul Alliance

To secure increased educational opportunities for Barat students, Barat College formed an educational alliance with DePaul University in February 2001. The simultaneously formed Barat Education Foundation is the custodian of the Barat endowment and supports programs and initiatives that perpetuate the Barat legacy. The Barat Education Foundation also maintains the connection to Barat alumnae and alumni as well as Barat supporters and friends.

Our Sacred Heart Heritage

In the aftermath of the French Revolution, St. Madeleine Sophie Barat recognized the need to open the doors of education to young women and the disadvantaged. Joined by a number of courageous women, she founded the Society of the Sacred Heart, and opened schools in France and later the United States.

The process of education either legitimizes the existing socioeconomic system or seeks to transform it in the light of different values and beliefs In the end, education is a profound political activity which seeks to influence the way people live their lives in society. (Society of the Sacred Heart 2004 Strategic Plan)