Katharine Elizabeth McBride (1904 - 1976) was an American academic in the fields of psychology and neuropsychology. She served as the fourth president of

Bryn Mawr College Bryn Mawr College ( ; Welsh: ) is a women's liberal arts college in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania. Founded as a Quaker institution in 1885, Bryn Mawr is one of the Seven Sister colleges, a group of elite, historically women's colleges in the United ...

from 1942 until 1970.

Early life and education

Katherine McBride was born May 14, 1904, in Philadelphia. She received her A.B. cum laude in 1925, her M.A. in 1927, and her Ph.D. in 1932, all from Bryn Mawr College. While a graduate student at Bryn Mawr College, McBride's dissertation advisor was James Leuba, the founder of Bryn Mawr's psychology research lab. In 1929, Katherine McBride was invited by neurologist, Dr. Theodore Weisenberg, to join an

aphasia Aphasia is an inability to comprehend or formulate language because of damage to specific brain regions. The major causes are stroke and head trauma; prevalence is hard to determine but aphasia due to stroke is estimated to be 0.1–0.4% in t ...

study. McBride had recently collaborated with Dr. Agnes Rogers, and Dr. Rogers recommended McBride to Dr. Weisenburg for the study. The study was funded, spanned five years and focused on the classification and assessment of aphasia in adults.

Aphasia study

The aphasia study included 230 patients and healthy adults, including 60 patients with aphasia. The study was monumental because it was the first aphasia study to use normal

control Control may refer to: Basic meanings Economics and business * Control (management), an element of management * Control, an element of management accounting * Comptroller (or controller), a senior financial officer in an organization * Controllin ...

s, to compare patients with and without aphasia, and to use standardized methodology. McBride and Weisenberg were influenced by

Henry Head Sir Henry Head, FRS (4 August 1861 – 8 October 1940) was an English neurologist who conducted pioneering work into the somatosensory system and sensory nerves. Much of this work was conducted on himself, in collaboration with the psychiatrist ...

's (1926) work on aphasia and his process for testing patients with aphasia. McBride used a subset of Head's individual tests for their assessment battery, but also supplemented the tests by adding measures of reading, writing, mathematics, and language intelligence. She also added a subset of non-language tests to the battery. In total, McBride and Weisenberg's battery for aphasia included tasks that assessed word repetition, naming, automatic word sequences, understanding spoken language, reading, writing, sentence completion, understanding analogies and opposites, digit and letter span, and sound recognition. The average length of the battery was 19 hours for aphasia patients and only 10 to 15 hours for controls. Only weeks after the final manuscript of the book was sent to the Commonwealth Fund in New York City for publication, Weisenberg died. McBride did not continue research in clinical neuropsychology and instead switched her focus to

educational psychology Educational psychology is the branch of psychology concerned with the scientific study of human learning. The study of learning processes, from both cognitive and behavioral perspectives, allows researchers to understand individual differences in ...

Career

By 1938, Katherine McBride became an associate professor at Bryn Mawr in both the Education and Psychology departments. In 1938, she was also appointed Assistant Dean at Bryn Mawr. In 1940, she left Bryn Mawr to become the Dean at Radcliffe College in Boston. On November 28, 1941, Katherine McBride became one of the youngest people to be named the president of an American university. She was also one of the few female presidents of American colleges at the time. Katherine McBride was the fourth president of Bryn Mawr college. As President, she advocated for her students by turning down government scholarship programs that required universities to report student protesters during the Vietnam War. In McBride's first year as president, she taught Child Psychology and co-led the Psychology Journal Club. McBride also was the Vice President of the College of Entrance Examination Board and Chair of the Committee on Tests. Even though not technically a practicing neuropsychologist, McBride continued to value standardization, confront measurement issues and develop test instruments. McBride was an active member of the

American Psychological Association The American Psychological Association (APA) is the largest scientific and professional organization of psychologists in the United States, with over 133,000 members, including scientists, educators, clinicians, consultants, and students. It ha ...

. She was elected a Fellow of the

American Academy of Arts and Sciences The American Academy of Arts and Sciences (abbreviation: AAA&S) is one of the oldest learned societies in the United States. It was founded in 1780 during the American Revolution by John Adams, John Hancock, James Bowdoin, Andrew Oliver, a ...

in 1968. McBride developed the Child Study Institute, a clinical, educational service that in present-day serves as a mental-health services center. She also oversaw the construction of the Mariam Coffin Canaday Library, Erdman Hall, Haffner Hall, and additions to the Park Science Center. McBride made a televised appearance on ABC News ''

Issues and Answers ''Issues and Answers'' was a once-weekly TV news program that was telecast by the American Broadcasting Company network from November 1960 to November 1981. The series was distributed to the ABC affiliate stations on Sunday afternoons for either ...

'' program on September 19, 1965. To a national audience, she espoused her beliefs in equality in higher education, and that greater assistance was needed for disadvantaged individuals to even the playing field in higher education. Katherine McBride died on June 3, 1976 after sustaining a heart attack.

Legacy

The “McBride Scholars” program was established in 1984. The Scholarship supports nontraditional, female college students who delayed college due to economic or family issues. The McBride Gateway in front of Pembroke Hall at Bryn Mawr College was erected in 1984 to honor Katherine McBride. A chapter of ''The Oxford Handbook of History of Clinical Neuropsychology'' was devoted to Katharine McBride's contributions, and the author stated, “It can be argued that McBride was one of the best neuropsychologists we never had. Overall, she is considered to be a pioneering figure among early aphasia clinicians and researchers who founded the field of clinical neuropsychology.

Quotes

From her research she internalized what she called "an inclination to ask about every event or kind of behavior, 'What can we learn from this?'"

Works

* McBride, K. E. (1932). A psychological study of aphasia. Unpublished dissertation, Bryn Mawr College. * Weisenburg, T. H., & McBride, K. E. (1935). Aphasia: A clinical and psychological study. New York, NY: The Commonwealth Fund. * Weisenburg, T. H., Roe, A., & McBride, K. E. (1936). Adult intelligence: A psychological study of test performances. New York, NY: The Commonwealth Fund. * McBride, K. E. (1941). Henry Head: 1861–1940. The American Journal of Psychology, 54, 444–446. * McBride, K. E. (1950). Review of “Language and language disturbances: Aphasic symptom complexes and their significance for medicine and the theory of language.” Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 45, 404–405. * McBride, K. E. (1972). ''Higher education and the pace of change'' (Vol. 1971). ittsburgh University of Pittsburgh Press.

References

External links

* * * {{DEFAULTSORT:McBride, Katharine Elizabeth Presidents of Bryn Mawr College 1904 births 1976 deaths Bryn Mawr College alumni Educators from Philadelphia American women educators Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences 20th-century American women 20th-century American people Women heads of universities and colleges 20th-century American academics