At 105 years old, Virginia Hislop seems to have finished her education, despite having dedicated her life to promoting greater access to education.
83 years after leaving Stanford University just short of receiving a master of art degree in education, Hislop applauded the school’s announcement on Sunday. After reaching out to the university, her son-in-law learned that the final thesis, which had been her unfulfilled duty, was no longer needed.
Hislop said to Stanford for a story on her almost lifelong trip to a stage on campus, where a certificate with a Cardinal-red cover was placed in her hand, “I’ve been doing this work for years and it’s nice to be recognised with this degree.”
Hislop skipped the thesis in 1941, just before the United States entered World War II directly, as her fiancé was getting ready to be ordered into the army.
Despite this, her time at Stanford, which began in 1936, was productive; she graduated with a degree in undergraduate instruction before entering doctoral work.
According to Hislop, she had intended to attend law school, but her father refused to cover the cost, so she chose to teach instead of going to law school for the shorter term.
Hislop has stated that she simply needed to submit the final draft of her thesis, having finished her master’s coursework. Rather than staying in town, she went on her honeymoon to Fort Sill, an Army installation in Oklahoma, close to her husband’s post.
She admitted to the station, “It’s not my ideal location for a honeymoon, but I had no other option.”
Such a sacrifice, giving up her work for marriage and starting a family, was justified at the time as a means of aiding in the war effort. It was given up for the United States.
Having grown up in Los Angeles, the California girl moved to Yakima, Washington, with her husband George after the war, where he joined in the family’s ranching business.
Raising two kids focused Hislop’s attention on education, a desire she had nurtured in Palo Alto.
“I didn’t return to teaching, but I feel I put my teaching certificate to good use serving in committees and on boards and trying to improve the educational opportunities every chance I got,” she stated to the Yakima Herald-Republic in 2018.
According to the journal, she ran and won a seat on the Yakima School District Board of Directors because she disagreed with middle school curricula that required home economics but not advanced English for her daughter.
In addition, Hislop was effective in his advocacy for autonomous community college districts in Washington state when Yakima’s two-year college was part of the K–12 system.
Eventually, she was brought in to help collect money for the establishment of Heritage University, a women-led, women-founded college located 20 miles south of Yakima.
In order to support students attending the school, she organised the annual Bounty of the Valley Scholarship Dinner, which by 2018 had raised close to $6 million. The school lists Hislop as an emeritus board member.
Her name is attached to a scholarship at Yakima’s Pacific Northwest University, a medical and health sciences school: the Virginia Hislop Emergency Fund.
When Virginia Hislop was growing up in West Los Angeles, her aunt, the administrator of a public school in the Sawtelle Japantown neighbourhood, may have sparked her interest in universal access to education.
A Civil War veteran’s home and care centre served as the area’s original focal point, but Japanese Americans and Latinos eventually began to inhabit Sawtelle.
Hislop told the Yakima Herald-Republic that she was struck by her aunt’s story of how education transformed lives on the Westside of Los Angeles.
According to her statement to the publication, “Aunt Nora would tell us about some of the Hispanic students in her school and how they were doing and the difference that education made for them.” “It seemed to me that having an education would open up limitless opportunities for you in the future, while not having one would.”
After a lifetime of promoting public education for all, she recently earned a degree in punctuation.
Hislop was given her master’s degree by Daniel Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, on Sunday. The dean described Hislop as “a fierce advocate for equity and the opportunity to learn.”
