A Perennial Educator

From left: June Rose Colby in the 1870s, standing at the center and toward the back, as the faculty advisor to the Sapphonian Society at Illinois State Normal University in 1897. A portrait of Colby from the 1870s. University Hall, one of the U-M buildings where Colby took classes (drawing at right).

At the age of 83, June Rose Colby opened her home to a local newspaper reporter. Colby (B.A. 1878, A.M. ’85, Ph.D. ’86) was well known in her city of Normal, Illinois, having taught literature for nearly 40 years at the state university across the street from her house.

She was a slip of a woman, standing five feet tall and weighing, on a good day, all of 100 pounds. A childhood illness had left her physically frail, but her intellect was fierce. She lived amidst the written word, from novels and poetry to atlases, travelogues, German verse, and literary magazines.

While thousands of students at Illinois State Normal University (ISNU) had known her as Miss Colby, she was always Rose to friends and family. She kept a porcelain jar in her living room that she filled with flower petals to mark the happy moments of her life.

She turned to the reporter.

“What would you like to ask me?

There was much to reflect upon.

She was born in 1856 to parents who prized education; her mother, Celestia, was a teacher and essayist who struggled to balance the demands of childrearing and the solitude of writing. When the University of Michigan announced in 1870 that it would begin admitting women—29 years after the first male students enrolled—the Colby family moved from northern Illinois to Ann Arbor so that Rose’s older sister, Vine, could attend. Brother Branch (yes, there was a botanical theme) followed in 1873. After graduating from Ann Arbor High School in 1874, Rose enrolled at U-M.

She loved the place.

“From the time it opened to women when I was 14 and knew I was to go to Michigan, it gave a settled purpose & wider outlook,” she wrote years later. “The work in the University was sound, hard, enlightening, creating or feeding a never-ceasing hunger for things of the mind.”

Consumed by learning, she studied English, French, German, and Latin toward a bachelor’s degree. Next came a master’s degree and a thesis about poet Matthew Arnold. In 1886, after successfully defending her dissertation (“Some Ethical Aspects of Later Elizabethan Tragedy”) before four faculty members, Colby was awarded a Ph.D. Her dissertation committee noted: “Miss Colby has done herself great credit, both in her thesis and on examination, and ... she has shown herself a person eminently fit to receive the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.”

The university had never granted a doctorate to a woman. And this woman believed in the power of literature and learning to unleash the potential of others.

From left: June Rose Colby and U-M friends crewing on the Huron River in about 1878; she is second from the right. Colby in her Normal, Illinois, home in 1940. Colby and fellow graduates of Ann Arbor High School in 1874; she is to the upper left of the lectern.

Just as Colby had loved being a student, students loved her.

After six years of teaching literature to high school students in Peoria, Illinois—her Ph.D. had not led directly to a college position—Colby joined the faculty at nearby ISNU (today Illinois State University) in early 1892 as professor of literature and preceptress, or dean of women.

Almost immediately, she set out to engage young women in intellectual conversations rather than what one called “hen socials.” Colby did this as advisor to the Sapphonian Society, a five-year-old women’s club, encouraging students to be serious and confident.

Women students gathered regularly—often at Colby’s home—to discuss current events, history, books, and sports (“the girls are being initiated into the mysteries of baseball”). “Sappho’s chief aim is not to please and entertain,” the group said in 1897, “but to improve and help.”

Her longtime commitment to Sapphonians led Illinois State yearbook editors to dedicate their 1914 edition to Colby while praising her workload of teaching all literature and composition courses and leadership as dean of women. “Only those who know of Miss Colby’s work in this school can appreciate fully the remarkable vitality which is particularly hers.”

Colby was never known for being loud or overly outspoken. She let her teaching and writing convey lessons beyond the novels and poems she adored.

She wrote about the value of making friends of all ages (“The strange vitality of spirit makes the spectacle of the oncoming lives, the young generations, of absorbing interest”) and the futility of libraries designating books for girls and boys (“We read both sorts”).

Colby also supported the women’s suffrage movement through her teaching; she saw teaching literature as a way of infusing students—boys as well as girls—with the “rights and wrongs and duties” of women. She lamented the decline of teaching classical languages. “The way the English language is slaughtered now is a tragedy. They are killing it with inane, empty, vulgar slang.”

Addressing a campus gathering during the first year of the Great War, Colby said literature could build bridges across cultures, because poetry and novels opened readers to the experiences and emotions of people worldwide.

“And when we have wept and laughed and loved and wrought with men and women, their very homes are dear to us, the very earth their feet have trod must feel friendly to our feet,” she said. “To lay waste their land becomes sacrilege.”

When Colby retired in 1931, student newspaper editors observed that her 40 years of service spanned more than half the lifetime of Illinois State itself. But she was timeless. “Dr. Colby has a youthfulness of mind that outstrips youth itself ...”

Yet time eventually prevailed.

Fourteen months after her newspaper interview, in the spring of 1941, Rose Colby died in her home, surrounded by books. She was 84, and her memory jar of flower petals was said to be full.

Top image: Bentley Historical Library and the Index class annual, Dr. Jo Ann Rayfield Archives, Illinois State University.

Bottom image: Bentley Historical Library (left and right) and McLean County Museum of History: Pantagraph Negative Collection, 1940–1945, Illinois Digital Archives.

Illustrations by DaJaniere Rice