Phyllis Beck, LAW '67, HON '97

My name is Phyllis Whitman Beck. I was the first woman to ever to serve on…to be elected to an appellate court in Pennsylvania, and the first woman to ever serve on the superior court. My parent both were immigrants and in a way we were a typical Jewish family where education was the premiere quality that my parents look for in their children.

How I decided to go to Law School… I was complaining to a friend of mine about wanting to do something with my life and my career, and I said I just didn’t know what direction to go in. And she said to me, “If you were a man, what would you have done?” And, I just had no answer for her, but it was just such a good question that it got me thinking.

I really didn’t have much of a campus life, I had four kids at home, I went to class, I spent a little time in the library and then I went home. The night school started out with a hundred and ten students and eleven of us got our degrees. It was basically a commuters’ school. Intellectually, it was an insular place; it no longer is and it is really on the forefront in terms of scholarship, and the remarkable thing to me about Temple is that despite its outstanding credentials, it’s never lost sight of its mission. And its mission is really to teach and to train… non-conventional students, as well as conventional students.