The Woman on the Diploma

Mary Julia Baldwin never married, never sat for a photograph, and turned a dying wartime seminary into one of the South’s most respected schools for women.

Photo via MaryBaldwin.edu

Every diploma the university issues carries a name that belonged to a specific, difficult, remarkable person, and it deserves to be known before the institution absorbed her into a brand. Mary Julia Baldwin was not a founder in the usual sense. She was something more interesting: the person who refused to let a founder’s project…