Virginia Hislop has spent a lifetime trying to increase access to education and now, at 105, appears to have completed her own education.
On Sunday, Hislop celebrated Stanford University’s master’s in education conference — 83 years after he left campus shortly before earning his degree. The son-in-law contacted the institution and discovered that the final thesis, his unfulfilled obligation, was no longer necessary.
“I’ve been doing this work for years and it’s nice to be recognized with this degree,” Hislop told Stanford for a story about her nearly lifelong journey to a campus stagewhere a diploma with a cardinal red cover was placed in his hand.
In 1941, on the eve of the United States’ direct involvement in World War II, and as her fiance prepared to be called up to serve, Hislop gave up his thesis.
Still, her days at Stanford, beginning in 1936, were fruitful, and she earned an undergraduate degree before moving directly to graduate studies.
She wanted to study law, Hislop said, but her father didn’t want to pay for it, so she opted for the shorter time required to teach.
Hislop had completed his master’s degree and just needed to submit the final version of his thesis, she said. Instead, she told NBC Bay Area, she fled the city and honeymooned in Oklahoma, near her husband’s military post at Fort Sill.
“It’s not my idea of a honeymoon place,” she told the station, “but I had no choice.”
At the time, such sacrifice – trading your career for marriage and a future family – was seen as a way of supporting the war effort. It was a sacrifice for America.
She grew up in Los Angeles, but after the war the California girl found herself with her husband George in Yakima, Washington, where George participated in the family ranching business.
They raised two children, which put Hislop’s focus on a passion nurtured during his days in Palo Alto: education.
“I haven’t returned to teaching, but I feel like I’ve put my teaching certificate to good use by serving on committees and boards and trying to improve educational opportunities whenever I can,” she told the Yakima Herald-Republic in 2018.
She opposed high school curricula that required home economics but not advanced English for her daughter, so she ran for the Yakima School District Board of Trustees and won, according to the publication.
Hislop also successfully lobbied for independent community college districts in Washington state at a time when Yakima’s two-year college was under the K-12 district.
She was eventually recruited to raise funds for what would become Heritage University, an institution founded and led by women about 20 miles south of Yakima.
She released the school’s annual Bounty of the Valley Scholarship Dinner, which in 2018 raised nearly $6 million to help students attend the institution. Hislop is listed by the school as an emeritus board member.
At Pacific Northwest University, a school of medicine and health sciences in Yakima, a scholarship, the Virginia Hislop Emergency Funddiscover your name.
His interest in broad access to education may have been inspired by an aunt who was the principal of a public school in the Sawtelle Japantown neighborhood of West Los Angeles when Hislop was growing up in Los Angeles.
Sawtelle is an area originally anchored by a housing and care center for disabled Civil War veterans, but has evolved into a community inhabited by Japanese Americans and Latinos.
Hislop said she was moved by her aunt’s experience seeing education change lives on the Westside of Los Angeles, according to the Yakima Herald-Republic.
“Aunt Nora was telling us about some of the Hispanic students at her school, how they were doing and the difference education made for them,” she told the publication. “It seemed to me that without education the future was limited and with education it was unlimited.”
Your new degree is the punctuation mark for a life dedicated to advocating public education for the masses.
On Sunday, Daniel Schwartz, dean of Stanford’s Graduate School of Education, presented Hislop with her master’s degree with a broad smile, describing her as “a fierce advocate for equity and the opportunity to learn.”
This article was originally published in NBCNews. with
