ABSTRACT
Dorothy’s father had strong academic ambitions, though his education had been irregular; he had no proper high-school diploma. For this reason, Chicago would not accept him as a graduate student, but Harvard would, so he went to Cambridge with his wife and
infant daughter and finished a Ph.D. in Shakespeare in two years. The next year, he taught at the University of Arkansas and then moved to Sweet Briar College in Virginia. After three years, the family moved back to Fayetteville, where they were soon established in a comfortable frame house right across from the campus and right next to a house later occupied by Hemphill Hosford, Chairman of the Mathematics Department. Virgil rose in the ranks and eventually became Dean of the College; in this capacity, he labored mightily to raise academic standards. Dorothy remembered his particular distaste for those faculty members with the A.B.D. degree-short for All But the Dissertation. Both Virgil and Isabel were suspicious of Bill Fulbright, whose mother had him appointed president of the university (it was later that Bill left for the Senate).
