Better Coed Than Dead

When all-girl Vassar announced last winter that it was exploring an affiliation with male Yale (TIME, Dec. 30), the college was far from taking a revolutionary or original step. All across the nation, separate-sex schools are rapidly going coed, and some educators wonder whether colleges that do not go along with the trend will survive at all. "Nowhere in the world," insists Vassar President Alan Simpson, "is anyone really making a powerful argument for separate education any more." Kenyon College President Franze Edward Lund agrees that separate education "is an anachronism in an age that admits less and less distinction between the sexes in both professional and social life."

The trend toward coeducation takes many forms, ranging from outright enrollment of the opposite sex to varying degrees of cooperation among sexually segregated schools. Kenyon, a liberal-arts college for men in Gambier, Ohio, expects to go coed within two years, is leaning toward the creation of a coordinate women's college. So is all-male Colgate University in Hamilton, N.Y. Wells College, a selective women's school along the shores of New York's Cayuga Lake, expects to accept male undergraduates within five years, probably in a coordinate men's branch.

Cutting Up the Cow. Many of the nation's colleges that remain segregated by sex are run by Roman Catholic religious orders--and these are abandoning separatism as eagerly as secular schools. Notre Dame, which last year absorbed the drama department of its feminine neighbor, St. Mary's College, is exploring more formal ties--much to the concern of the St. Mary's faculty. One informal survey showed that 40% of St. Mary's teachers do not now meet Notre Dame standards, presumably would suffer in any merger. But Notre Dame seems so intent on affiliation, says St. Mary's English Instructor Michael Yetman, that "it sounds as if the cow has been sold, and a decision is needed only as to how it should be cut up."

In the Southwest and Far West, where there is only a handful of separate colleges left, the College of Santa Fe, operated by the Christian Brothers, accepted its first female students last fall. Last month, all-girl Marymount College in suburban Los Angeles and Loyola University of Los Angeles, a Catholic men's school, announced their affiliation plans. Marymount will move from Palos Verdes Estates to the Loyola campus, near the Los Angeles International Airport, in 1968. Immaculate Heart, another women's school in Los Angeles, will join the coed Claremont Colleges, which pioneered the cluster-college concept, by 1970. Missouri's Webster College, where President Jacqueline Grennan (TIME, Jan. 20) resigned from the Sisters of Loretto to dramatize her belief in lay control of education, now has 75 men among its 900 girl undergraduates, and its faculty is pushing for full coed status.

If Yale and Vassar do affiliate, six of the "seven sisters" will have found brothers--of a sort.* As it happens, one of the few major men's schools that are not considering coeducation is Princeton. There, however, only 14% of the undergraduates prefer the all-male environment and President Robert Goheen says that he has no objections to Princeton's going coed--if someone will donate the $80 million he figures it would take to start a high-quality women's branch.

People, Not Playmates. Much of the college rush toward coeducation is explained by economics. As costs mount, many schools are forced to seek more students to bring in more tuition, find it far easier to attract students to a coed school. Coeducation also virtually doubles the fund-raising possibilities in a school's community. Mergers and affiliations also provide more economical operation; neighboring schools that agree to some plan of union can share faculties, libraries and lab facilities, avoid duplication of academic specialties.

Most educators today also see sound psychological reasons for mixed classes. "The mix tones up the give and take, furnishes a broader view," argues Webster College Vice President Joseph Kelly. Vassar's Simpson notes that "the more diversity in background and point of view that comes out in a classroom, the richer the experience." Catholic educators, who have traditionally been wary about the "dangers" of too much sexual intermingling in classes, also concede that coeducation provides students with a sounder basis for marriage. The mixed campus provides a meshing of intellectual and social life in which the boys find, says Kirkland's President Samuel Babbitt, that "girls become people, not just playmates."

Although they are badly outnumbered, defenders of the single-sex campus maintain that girls are more apt to display their intellectual talents when they are not also vying for dates in the classroom, that either sex concentrates more intently on classwork when they are separated, that the separate campus is more relaxed and casual in dress. Some also contend that a coed curriculum tends to overemphasize masculine vocational interests. After competing with men in a coed college, claims President Paul Weaver of Ohio's all-girl Lake Erie College, a girl is likely to become "dissatisfied in the role of mother and homemaker."

Berserk Over Boys. A minority of students at single-sex schools seems to agree. "I like going around looking grubby all week long," says one Vassar student. "If women were around all the time," says a Princeton sophomore, "I wouldn't get anything done--I'd be spending just about all my time with them." Barnard College Junior Jean McKenzie, who has taken some courses at nearby Columbia, argues that "in mixed classes you don't really get a mixed point of view; the men talk, and the women listen."

The frequent shift of sophomores to coed schools is strong evidence, to many college educators, that students today are generally disenchanted with a single-sex school. Jennifer McMurray, who switched from Georgia's all-girl Agnes Scott College to coed Emory, insists that "at Scott, when you got out into the world you went berserk," while at Emory, "I act more ladylike--even my language is better." At Christian College, a women's school in Columbia, Mo., Student Susan Hoffman declares: "Girls' schools retard, stunt and warp your social growth and maturity. Every time you see a boy, it takes about a week to recover." Why then do students choose an all-girl or an all-male school? Answers one Vassar junior: "I knew Vassar was all-girl when I came here. But I was stupid when I came here."

*Radcliffe and Harvard are, in effect, coed. Barnard girls can attend classes at Columbia, which has many women students of its own and Columbia's males can take Barnard courses. Bryn Mawr girls, Haverford men and students of coed Swarthmore may take courses at all three schools, and some 400 out of 2,700 do. Girls at Smith and Mt. Holyoke can enroll in classes at Amherst and the University of Massachusetts (each is about five miles from the others), but relatively few do so. Only Wellesley has no institutional ties with a male institution.

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