Psychology Notes Historic Connections

In April McMicken’s Department of Psychology celebrated the 75th anniversary of a historic event. Inez Beverly Prosser earned her doctorate in educational psychology from the college in 1933, making her the first African-American woman to earn a doctoral degree in the discipline.

Prosser’s accomplishment was one of two notable instances in psychology that touched the college. McMicken College of Arts and Sciences also served as the academic home, albeit for one year, of Margaret Floy Washburn, the first woman to earn a doctorate in psychology.

“It’s interesting that here in staid, conservative Cincinnati, at least at UC, there was this openness to diversity of students and faculty,” said Robert Frank, Department of Psychology professor and associate dean for research and graduate studies.

Shawn Bediako, assistant professor of psychology at University of Maryland – Baltimore County and former McMicken faculty member, agreed with Frank’s observation.

“Cincinnati in general seems to be a very conservative place,” he said. “The irony is that in the late 1800s and early 1900s, UC was among the more progressive and egalitarian universities in the Midwest.”

Washburn’s encounter with the department preceded Prosser’s by three decades. After studying as a “hearer,” or auditor, student in the then-male-only graduate program at Columbia University, Washburn earned her PhD in psychology from Cornell University in 1894. She taught at Wells College and Cornell before taking a position at UC in 1902. Though Washburn left the university to teach at Vassar College in 1903, Frank said that the research lab she and her predecessor, Charles Judd, established represented the cutting edge of the profession in its early years.

“We have these two early faculty members in psychology who were trained by the founders of the field,” he said. “Psychology as a research field was a new concept, and she was an early adopter and pioneer of that approach.”

Washburn would later go on to publish more than 100 articles and was elected president of the American Psychological Association in 1921. She was the first female psychologist elected to the National Academy of Sciences, an honor she earned in 1932.

Prosser had a more direct connection to McMicken's Department of Psychology, completing her doctorate in 1933. Bediako said that her dissertation, in which she explored the social implications of school integration on African-American children, created some controversy in the early days of the integration movement.

“Her dissertation caused people to say, ‘hold up, wait a minute,’” he said. She concluded that African-American children could learn the same material as white children and might be affected in unexpected ways by the social aspects of integration. This theory caused a stir with civil rights activists pushing for quick school integration.

“She was one of the first to look at the social aspects of education on black children,” he said.

The dissertation landed Prosser on the cover of The Crisis, a widely read civil rights news magazine published by the NAACP.

Unfortunately, the pioneering scholar would not have a chance to expand her body of research. She was killed in a car accident in 1934, after a year of postdoctoral teaching at Tillotson College, in her home state of Texas.

Bediako said Prosser’s legacy went beyond her degree and beyond her research, to qualities remembered by colleagues and family members.

“She wasn’t really a very outspoken kind of person,” he said, noting that many people at the April symposium recalled her quiet yet brilliant nature. “She seems to me as a type of role model public scholars should aspire to.”