In the Company of Men

By Tim Padgett/Crawfordsville

Forgive my alma mater if the best it can do for a homecoming queen is a student in drag. Wabash, a small, liberal-arts college in Crawfordsville, Ind., is all male--one of only three such schools in the U.S. The student newspaper is called the Bachelor, and freshmen still shout the school song from the chapel steps each fall with more ferocity and face paint than the Scots wore in Braveheart.

But the testosterone level turns from the 1290s to the 1990s when I sit down with students from the Men and Masculinity course. Its wide-open discussions, on books and films as varied as Black Boy and Adam's Rib, dissect their assumptions about manhood. Jimmy Burress, a gay student who took the class as a freshman two years ago, says it helped him come out of the closet. Physics major David Woessner, meanwhile, was inspired by works like Shane to embrace the virtues of chivalry--when there are women around to practice them with. I ask the guys about the less than chivalrous behavior of President Clinton, whose attorney during the Monica Lewinsky mess was a Wabash alumnus, David Kendall. Says Scott Berger, a football player: "I think Clinton betrayed his gender."

Wabash, remarkably, has preserved its gender--and has even made it a trendy selling point. Men's colleges once looked about as viable as castrato choirs. But Wabash, independent since it was founded in 1832, is giving its Georgian campus a $100 million face lift, with modern science and sports facilities, and has just enrolled one of its largest and smartest freshman classes in years. It's a tribute to the college's richly intimate teaching traditions: its fewer than 1,000 students, from all economic backgrounds, often learn as much over dinner and wine tastings at professors' houses as they do in the classroom. But it may also reflect the fact that males are a fashionable subject again. The men's movement, and the rise of male-simpatico feminists like Susan Faludi, have lent quaint Wabash a hip cachet. "An important liberal-arts ideal is 'Know thyself,'" says Wabash president Andrew Ford. "Sometimes you can do that best, or more comfortably, among your own gender, and we offer that choice."

Another liberal-arts ideal is "Know thy world," which is why, even as I prize the education I received there, I favor admitting women. Being all male hasn't always been easy for Wabash--especially after it voted down co-education in 1992. Right-wing think tanks, hoping to adopt the college as a mascot, mounted a nasty campaign to roll back the school's long history of multicultural studies, while hard-core feminists stormed the campus with politically correct, male-bashing lectures like "Athletes as Rapists."

But Wabash held its academic ground--and instead co-opted the decade's new male zeitgeist. Even traditional courses like mythology examine "male/female archetypes, with readings from Camille Paglia and Robert Bly." In this day of the Million Man March, the college's Malcolm X Institute has assumed a larger influence on campus. Alumni are hailed not just in Big Business (former AT&T chairman Robert Allen) but also in show business (Broadway costume designer Tom Broecker), and Wabash was the first college to produce the Pulitzer-prizewinning play about AIDS, Angels in America. At the same time, Wabash's old-fashioned but effective code, "The Gentleman's Rule"--which says the only rule is that students behave like gentlemen--is winning grudging applause at national higher-education conferences.

Still, though the co-education debate has died down, it quietly lingers among faculty. "Women still need women's colleges because society's playing field isn't level yet," argues classics professor Leslie Day, one of 17 women on the faculty and a graduate of all-female Bryn Mawr College. "I worry that the message the guys get here is that women are just for weekends." She rolls her eyes as a student enters her office wearing a jesting T shirt that reads WABASH DOESN'T NEED WOMEN.

Academic reputation, of course, matters more than male bonding. "I came here in spite of it being all male," says a student who was lured by the demanding pre-med program. But for the time being, Wabash is reaping the rewards of being true to its gender.