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.
Names in the Ivy League
In the end, Hermann Glaser, Nuremberg’s culture minister at that time, came up with a novel way of responding to the site’s dissonant heritage—a strategy he called Trivialisierung, or trivialization. “What should be done,” Macdonald writes, “was to let the buildings fall into a state of semi-disrepair but not total ruin. They should be allowed to look ugly and uncared-for. And they should be used for banal uses, such as for storage, and leisure activities like tennis and motor-racing.” This “profanation” of the Nuremberg rallying grounds aimed to keep them available to history while denying them the dignity and sacredness that the Nazis had longed to create.
.. In suggesting that “the name of the University itself” was up for grabs, Holloway was referring to the fact that Eli Yale, the university’s founder, was an official of the East India Company and a slave trader.
.. The notion that Calhoun College could remain Calhoun College, and that its name could become, in some sense, an ironic form of critique, suggests just how different universities are from other places.
.. In fact, because Calhoun’s name is protected by South Carolina’s Heritge Act, changing the name of the street is more or less impossible.)
.. The vast Gothic campuses of Princeton and Yale communicate a different idea. Their towers and arches embody a sense of timelessness and power that is profoundly linked to the history of white Europe.