Male & Females

For a man, life in a girls' school, Classics Professor Theodore Erck decided, is a lonely sort of existence. As one of 49 male teachers at Vassar College (enrollment: 1,370) in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., he had long felt a bit like the "sad and forlorn little fellow in the advertisement who is surrounded by hundreds of people, all reading the Bulletin except himself." Finally, in the current issue of the Vassar Alumnae Magazine, 42-year-old Professor Erck told more.

Coping with female students, he reported, could be literally overwhelming. "When [a professor] meets them coming down the sidewalk toward him three abreast, they refuse to break rank and simply push him off into the grass . . . They invariably park their bicycles right in front of the door or the steps and let you fall over them as you come out. If you survive that, they ride down upon you from the rear as silently as Indians . . .

"The number and variety of their costumes and disguises are countless . . . This eccentricity makes the problem of learning the names of a new class a formidable one for a man. He sees the girls on Monday morning looking like the wrath of God with hair uncombed and overalls pulled on over their pajamas, and gets to know them thus. He sees them again on Friday afternoon looking more glamorous than Conover models and doesn't recognize them . . ."

But, admitted Erck, "the girls do study now and then and sometimes they produce quite excellent results." When they do poorly, "they take their penalties like men, and if under the weight of their trials . . . they do allow themselves to burst into tears . . . they become very angry with themselves. This, of course, only makes them cry all the harder for the moment, but then they go off and try again."

What makes men teach at women's colleges? "A young instructor summed it up very neatly the other day when he said, 'I think women are wonderful.'"

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.