A strong public advocate, she worked hard to advance the professional, political, and academic place of women in the world and was a general proponent of expanded educational opportunity.

That same year, Blanding was hired as a physical education instructor by the University of Kentucky, where she simultaneously began her undergraduate work in the A.B.

Blanding obtained her master's degree in political science at Columbia University in 1926, and pursued graduate studies at the London School of Economics under Harold Laski.

She demanded that students (all females at that time) withdraw from the college if they engaged in premarital sex.

In 1949, she helped establish the Mary Conover Mellon Foundation for the Advancement of Education, a research program that studied and promoted the psychological welfare of college students.

An evaluation of Vassar was conducted under Blanding's leadership in the form of a two-year assessment, which reviewed everything from living conditions to academic objectives.

She also instituted the house fellow system, where faculties lived in dormitories alongside students.

In the 1950s, she spoke out to protect the rights of several faculty members against allegations made by Senator Joseph McCarthy.

Upon her retirement as Vassar president in 1964, the college presented Blanding with a tractor "evoking both the practical effects of her tenure and her Kentucky childhood".