Where Girls Are Inconvenient

The judgment that ministers should be men led America's early universities, which were essentially seminaries, to refuse admission to girls. Coeducation did not start until 1837, when Oberlin let some women in. By the turn of the century, Columbia's President Nicholas Murray Butler thought the battle for coeducation had been fought and won: "The American people have settled the matter. Why discuss it further?"

Yet discuss it further is just what the student daily at all-male Princeton has lately been trying to do. "Coeducation is the solution for Princeton's social illness," argues the Daily Princetonian. Last week the paper got a chilly reply--no--from President Robert F. Goheen. Letting girls into the university, he said, might "solve some problems, but it would create others."

In point of fact, girls do attend Princeton: ten of them are enrolled in undergraduate language courses and live off-campus in a house with an unlisted phone. This 320-to-1 boy-girl ratio only goes to stress that Princeton is the nation's most conspicuous holdout against women. The objection is no longer theological, or even philosophical. It's just that Princeton considers girls so terribly inconvenient. The university is committed to hold down enrollment to about the present level of 3,000. To let in girls would mean driving out boys--and already four well-qualified boys are turned away for every one admitted.

At least some students at coed Duke University share Goheen's doubts. In a letter to the Daily Princetonian, three disillusioned Duke males cited "the facts: Females having the required intellectual aptitudes to compete successfully in your classrooms will not exactly measure up to the dreams you entertain while reading Playboy." The number of girls admitted to Princeton would necessarily be only a fraction of the male enrollment, they pointed out, so competition for their favors would make the males feel as though they were "trying to get into a free exhibit at the New York World's Fair."

Yale College stands with Princeton--for reasons best expressed by the late President A. Whitney Griswold who remarked that the school might consider coeducation if it had $50 million to spare. On the other hand, Yale's graduate schools enroll 800 women. Harvard has long since gone coed and likes it. "Women are people, and they're here to stay," says Harvard College Dean John Monro. Harvard began admitting Radcliffe girls to its classes during World War II, eventually abolished separate courses. Since coeducation came gradually, it did not require any major policy changes. Coeducation, says Monro, "proved to be a pleasant, civilized way to do things. My message to Yale and Princeton, when they are ready, is 'Come on in, the water's fine.' "

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