Virginia Hislop has spent her life trying to improve access to education, and now, at the age of 105, she appears to have completed her own education.
On Sunday, Hislop celebrated Stanford University’s conference on a Master of Art degree in education – 83 years after he left campus just shy of receiving his degree. Her son-in-law had contacted the institution and discovered that a senior thesis, her unfulfilled obligation, was no longer necessary.
“I’ve been doing this work for years and it’s nice to be recognized with this diploma,” Hislop told Stanford for a story about her nearly lifelong journey to a podium on campus, where a diploma was placed in a cardinal red cover. her hand.
In 1941, on the eve of the United States’ direct involvement in World War II, and as her fiancé prepared to be called to serve, Hislop skipped the dissertation.
Her Stanford days, which began in 1936, were nevertheless fruitful, and she earned a bachelor’s degree before going straight to graduate study.
She wanted to go to law school, Hislop said, but her father wouldn’t pay for it, so she opted for the shorter time required to teach.
Hislop had completed courses for a master’s degree and only had to submit the final version of her thesis, she said. Instead, she told NBC Bay Area, she left town and honeymooned in Oklahoma, near her husband’s Army post at Fort Sill.
“Not my idea of a honeymoon spot,” she told the station, “but I had no choice.”
At the time, such a sacrifice – trading her career for marriage and a future family – was seen as a way to support the war effort. It was a sacrifice for America.
She had grown up in Los Angeles, but after the war the California girl found herself with husband George in Yakima, Washington, where George participated in the family business of ranching.
They raised two children, leaving Hislop to focus on a passion sparked during her days in Palo Alto: education.
“I haven’t returned to teaching, but I feel like I put my teaching credential to good use by serving on committees and boards and trying to improve educational opportunities with every chance I got,” she told the Yakima in 2018 Herald Republic.
She opposed high school curricula that required home economics but not advanced English for her daughter, so she ran for the Yakima School District board of directors and won, according to the release.
Hislop also successfully lobbied for independent community college districts in Washington state at a time when Yakima’s two-year college was under the otherwise K-12 district.
She was eventually recruited to raise money for what would become Heritage University, a women-founded, women-led institution about twenty miles south of Yakima.
She launched the school’s annual Bounty of the Valley Scholarship Dinner, which raised nearly $6 million in 2018 to help students attend the institution. Hislop is listed by the school as a board member emerita.
At Pacific Northwest University, a school of medical and health sciences in Yakima, a scholarship, the Virginia Hislop Emergency Fund, bears her name.
Her interest in broad access to education may have been inspired by an aunt who was a public school principal in the Sawtelle Japantown neighborhood of West Los Angeles when Hislop was growing up in LA.
Sawtelle is an area that originally consisted of a housing and care facility for disabled Civil War veterans, but it developed into a community populated by Japanese Americans and Latinos.
According to the Yakima Herald-Republic, Hislop said she was moved by her aunt’s experience of seeing how education changed lives on LA’s Westside.
“Aunt Nora told us about some Spanish-speaking students at her school and how they were doing and what difference education made for them,” she told the publication. “It seemed to me that without an education your future was limited and with an education it was unlimited.”
Her new degree is the punctuation for a lifetime of advocating for public education for the masses.
On Sunday, Daniel Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, presented Hislop with her master’s degree with a broad smile, describing her as “a fierce advocate for equality and the opportunity to learn.”
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
