Olive G. Wyse Scholarship Fund

Former students of Professor of Home Economics Olive G. Wyse say they miss her quiet wisdom and her surprising ability to connect scientific knowledge with real life. They say she was exacting but fair, quick to correct but always tactful and gentle. Above all she was grounded in faith and deeply concerned about her students. She taught at Goshen College for 50 years, from 1926 to 1976. She took her field from a time when most of her women students could expect to work at home to a day when the skills and values she taught could be applied to many different careers.

Although the home economics major was eventually discontinued, Wyse’s work helped pave the way for women in all fields. She was the first professional home economist in the Mennonite church to earn a doctorate in education (from Columbia University in 1946) and the first woman to reach the rank of full professor on the Goshen College faculty. “Dr. Wyse expected us to be able to compete with the other disciplines and expected excellence from us,” said L. Marlene Cender Kaufman ’61. Her students became teachers, nurses, nutritionists, dietitians, social workers and foreign relief workers. Others did indeed run households and raise families, and they did so with excellent skills in time and money management, child care and nutrition.

Teaching at a small college in the early years required great personal sacrifice. Faculty pay was low and Wyse lived with students in a dorm. But, said Evelyn Burkholder Kreider ’36, “I never heard her give voice to those sacrifices….that kind of devotion helped build the bridge between the Goshen College of then and now.” Wyse was a visionary who led the call for equal pay for women faculty, redesigned her department to place it within the liberal arts curriculum and taught women to find balance in life. “She emphasized the importance of preserving the Christian home and for women to find room to pursue education and careers,” said Marlene Kaufman. “She was passionate about us finishing school.” Under Wyse’s care, the Home Economics Department thrived, adding two additional instructors and eventually occupying a full floor in the Arts Building (now Olive G. Wyse Hall).

During her distinguished career, Wyse led nutrition workshops for teachers in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, spent a semester as a visiting scholar at Harvard School of Public Health, served as foods editor for a magazine on home and family life and led a consortium of Mennonite colleges to provide overseas learning experiences for home economics majors.

But her students always came first. “Olive Wyse was a mentor who taught by word and deed,” said Jocele Thut Meyer ’50. “In her everyday life she exemplified Christian principles of stewardship of time and materials and the value of relationships.” When Doris Miller Glick ’46 faced a personal tragedy, Wyse’s “obvious sympathetic caring made it possible for me to hear her words of advice and encouragement,” said Miller Glick. “I will always be grateful to her.”

Olive G. Wyse was born in Wayland, Iowa in 1906 and died in 2005 at the age of 99. A lectureship in her name was established at Goshen College in 1976. After Wyse’s death, the lectureship became a scholarship honoring her wish to support students in early childhood education.