Grace Scully

Title: Grace Scully
LC Subject: Universities and colleges--Faculty Portraits Physical education and training
Creator: Hise Studio
Description: Grace Mary Scully was a Professor of Physical Education for Women from 1946 to 1957. She was born in 1915 in El Reno, Oklahoma. She studied at Eastern Oregon College, University of Washington, and University of Oregon, graduating from the latter in 1942 with a Bachelor of Science in Physical Education and Biological Science. She earned her Master of Science in 1946 from University of Oregon, in health and physical education. For her thesis, she studied flexibility. While attending University of Oregon, she was a graduate assistant and briefly an instructor. She also had experience teaching elementary and secondary school, supervising health and physical education at University High School in Eugene, Oregon, and had been a director of a summer playground program and camp counselor. OSC hired her at $2400 for a ten month term. She became an assistant professor in 1950. She took sabbatical leave from 1954-55, on half salary, to get her doctorate from Columbia University Teachers’ College. After this, she requested an an additional leave of absence to complete her dissertation. Her work was funded by the Ford Foundation and “some Carnegie money.” The organization supervising her work was the Greater New York Council for Foreign Students. She felt that, though her subject might at first glance seem unrelated to her work at OSC, she was learning more about people foreign and domestic, which she considered “basic to the excellent teaching of anything.” In June 1956, she received her PhD. in Guidance and Student Personnel Administration, with additional study in counseling. Her doctoral thesis was titled “A Study of Students from Abroad Who Do Not Wish to Return Home.” Unlike her study subjects, Scully was anxious to return to her “beloved Oregon.” She wrote two separate, very similar letters announcing her graduation to President Strand, who teased her for already developing “professorial absent-mindedness.” Apparently she had forgotten to sign the first by hand, and so she wrote another, but could not retrieve the first from the postal service. In 1957, she accepted a position as Associate Professor at Northern Illinois State College at De Kalb, where she taught dance education, in addition to counseling, and guiding a number of graduate students. She made it clear she had “made every effort to stay in this state.” President Strand apologized she had “come to the decision she did,” and chalked it up to a “personality conflict.” Professor Scully responded that the issue was not due to personality conflict and was instead because others were “firstest with the mostest”--a famous Southern phrase which essentially means that one group got there first, with greater numbers, and dominated the scene thereafter. Dr Seen attributed her decision to leave to the fact that Professor Scully wished to teach dance, but OSC already had a dance education professor. After Illinois, she became Associate Professor and Assistant Director of Student Personnel Services at Paterson State College. She was president of Phi Beta Sigma, and a member of Sigma Alpha Chi and Kappa Delta Pi.
Work Type: photographic prints photographs black-and-white photographs
Date: 1947
Identifier: P092:0531
Rights: In Copyright
Local Collection Name: President's Office Photographs, 1923-1998 (P 092)
Type: Image
Format: image/tiff
Set: OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center Historical Images of Oregon State University
Primary Set: OSU Special Collections & Archives Research Center
Institution: Oregon State University