Grad gets degree — after 65 years

Sixty-five years after she completed the required course work, 88-year-old Jane Louisa Ayers McAleavey, of Fort Worth, Texas, will be awarded a master’s degree in botany Saturday , May 18. She says it will be an exciting moment of fulfillment in her life.

She had been advised that the University of Wisconsin was the best place to study botany, so she came to the Madison campus in the summer of 1934 to begin working toward her degree. She continued her studies in the summers of ’35, ’36, and ’37.

She met her husband Frank here, married him, and moved with him to Ithaca, N.Y., so he could study architecture at Cornell. She had earned the credits needed to complete her master’s, but wasn’t sure she had satisfied the residency requirement the University of Wisconsin had in place back then. She thought she’d have to attend for one more summer in order in order to get her degree, but it never happened.

Earlier this year, after discovering the university no longer has a residency requirement, Frank wrote to inquire whether Jane could finally receive her degree.

“They had to dust off the microfiche because the records were so old!” Jane says with a laugh.

After checking historical files to verify that McAleavey had completed her requirements, the Botany Department recommended approval of the request and asked the Graduate School to grant her a retroactive M.S. degree with a completion date of August 1937.

Though she did very little classroom teaching (several years at Wichita State and five years as a substitute teacher in the Wichita public schools), Jane says she has had lots of opportunities throughout her life to share the knowledge she gained from her studies.

“I don’t feel that I’ve wasted any of my education. I just went at it in another way –mostly through volunteer work,” she says. “I had a very good science education for a woman of my era.” She was a very good student, too. On the current four-point scale, her grade point average would have been 3.92.

McAleavey’s husband of 65 years will be in the audience on Saturday to cheer her on, as will their son David, a professor of literature at George Washington University in Washington, D.C.