How the Quad Went Coed
Fifty years ago, same-sex schooling in higher education had ended for many public colleges and universities in the United States and Britain, but it remained the norm at most elite universities in the Northeast—the Ivy League schools of Yale, Princeton, Dartmouth and Harvard and comparable private women colleges such as Vassar, Smith and Wellesley. Cambridge and Oxford, too, had resisted coeducation.
.. Ms. Malkiel convincingly argues that it took the tidal wave of social movements in that decade—student free speech, war opposition, civil rights, sexual freedom and women’s liberation—to disrupt the northeastern elites’ complacency. Change came, but it came kicking and screaming, and not from any sense of fairness or feminist impulse. It was pragmatic: Scrupulously monitored application trends made it clear that, as the 1960s progressed, the best of the boys were going where the girls were.
.. She describes how various alternative arrangements were considered (such as moving Vassar to New Haven and Sarah Lawrence to Princeton!) and discarded.
.. “What is all this nonsense about admitting women to Princeton? A good old-fashioned whore-house would be considerably more efficient and much, much cheaper,” wrote one anonymous alumnus to the Princeton Alumni Weekly in 1968.
.. Most participants in the Ivy League debates over whether to admit women students looked at the question of coeducation solely from the male students’ point of view
.. Dartmouth boys, for example, rated their female classmates’ looks from one to 10 with placards in the dining hall. Signs hanging on campus declared, “Better Dead Than Coed.” The college anthem, “Men of Dartmouth,” remained unchanged until 1988.