“Eighth sister” no more: The evolving mission of Connecticut College

This dissertation examines how Connecticut College for Women\u27s founding mission and vision have informed its institutional evolution over nearly 100 years—revealing how Connecticut College\u27s founding to provide educational opportunity for women has been altered by coeducation, and how the College has been shaped by the key roles that curricular emphasis and local community played at its point of origin. Drawing on archival research, oral history interviews, and seminal works on higher education history and women\u27s history, this investigation provides a view into the liberal arts segment of American higher education, where many small colleges struggle for sustenance. Examining Connecticut College\u27s founding in the context of its evolution illustrates whether—and if so how—founding mission and vision inform the way colleges describe what they are and do, and whether there are essential elements of founding mission and vision that must be remembered or preserved? One key finding concerns Connecticut College for Women\u27s historical significance. Through its stated mission and curricular offerings, Connecticut College for Women was the first prominent college to acknowledge that women would be working out in the world. When it opened in 1915, Connecticut College paired the rigorous academic and liberal arts curriculum found at the older Seven Sister colleges with curricular features that prepared women for the growing number of occupations available to them. Like the Sisters, Connecticut College offered traditional liberal arts majors, but unlike the Sisters, it also offered vocational majors such as home economics and courses in secretarial skills. Yet Connecticut College has been left out of the literature on women\u27s colleges. A similar scholarship gap exists for two other colleges founded around the same time with similar aims: Simmons College and Skidmore College. Connecticut, Simmons, and Skidmore represented a significant evolutionary step beyond the Seven Sisters, and their omission from scholarship on American women\u27s higher education is a gap that impedes a full understanding of the subject

A critique on the structural analysis of lignins and application of novel tandem mass spectrometric strategies to determine lignin sequencing

International audienceThis review is devoted to the application of MS using soft ionization methods with a special emphasis on electrospray ionization, atmospheric pressure photoionization and matrix‐assisted laser desorption/ionization MS and tandem MS (MS/MS) for the elucidation of the chemical structure of native and modified lignins. We describe and critically evaluate how these soft ionization methods have contributed to the present‐day knowledge of the structure of lignins. Herein, we will introduce new nomenclature concerning the chemical state of lignins, namely, virgin released lignins (VRLs) and processed modified lignins (PML). VRLs are obtained by liberation of lignins through degradation of vegetable matter by either chemical hydrolysis and/or enzymatic hydrolysis. PMLs are produced by subjecting the VRL to a series of further chemical transformations and purifications that are likely to alter their original chemical structures. We are proposing that native lignin polymers, present in the lignocellulosic biomass, are not made of macromolecules linked to cellulose fibres as has been frequently reported. Instead, we propose that the lignins are composed of vast series of linear related oligomers, having different lengths that are covalently linked in a criss‐cross pattern to cellulose and hemicellulose fibres forming the network of vegetal matter. Consequently, structural elucidation of VRLs, which presumably have not been purified and processed by any other type of additional chemical treatment and purification, may reflect the structure of the native lignin. In this review, we present an introduction to a MS/MS top–down concept of lignin sequencing and how this technique may be used to address the challenge of characterizing the structure of VRLs. Finally, we offer the case that although lignins have been reported to have very high or high molecular weights, they might not exist on the basis that such polymers have never been identified by the mild ionizing techniques used in modern MS. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd