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5. A Friendly Rivalry: Yale and Princeton Pursue Parallel Paths to Coeducation
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111 5 A Friendly Rivalry Yale and Princeton Universities Pursue Parallel Paths to Coeducation Marcia Synnott Can this University, being a national institution, continue to justify denying educational opportunities to any person because of race, creed, or sex? We think not. —Gardner Patterson, special report on “The Education of Women at Princeton,” July 12, 1968. By the 1960s, among the eight Ivy League colleges only Dartmouth, Princeton, and Yale were still male-only, and they felt increasing pressure to include the education of undergraduate women in their institutional missions. The other five Ivy League colleges educated women, mostly through some type of coordinate relationship with a woman’s college. Their gender ratios preserved male dominance: Brown-Pembroke (64:36); Columbia-Barnard (64:36); Cornell (75:25); Harvard-Radcliffe (80:20); and the University of Pennsylvania (70:30). Given the opportunity to attend these five colleges, or other prestigious coeducational universities like Stanford, why did women want to attend Yale and Princeton? After all, Yale and Princeton were known to have thoroughly masculine campus environments, fiercely devoted alumni, competitive athletic rivalries, and mostly all-white student bodies who were selected as much on secondary school affiliations and alumni connections as on high grade point averages and test scores. A New Yorker cartoon captured one of the reasons: “Princeton, did you say?” one woman asked another at a cocktail party, “How interesting. I’m a Yale man myself.” The struggle to define oneself as either a “Princeton woman” or a “Yale woman” would take much longer—until undergraduate women were sufficiently numerous to contribute to each others’ education and establish an unmistakable visual presence on campus.1 CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 111 5/26/04 4:53:41 PM 112 Conversion to Coeducation in the Ivy League From 1967 to 2001, Yale and Princeton followed parallel paths in their decisions to admit women, to increase their numbers, to assimilate them into their academic and social cultures, and to recruit female faculty members and administrators. Both institutions also worked to maintain alumni loyalty as they implemented these far-reaching changes. At some stages in the process, Yale was the leader, and Princeton had to catch up. At other times, their roles were reversed. Without the example of the other, perhaps neither would have made the progress it did in recruiting and integrating women into the student body and faculty. This essay focuses principally on the enrollment of women undergraduates, although a complete assessment of women’s progress should mention their enrollments in the graduate and professional schools and the hiring of female faculty members. Charting the progress of women at Yale is more complicated than at Princeton because in addition to Yale College (founded in 1701), Yale University (1887) consists of a Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1847) and ten professional schools. In contrast, Princeton consists primarily of an undergraduate college (1746), which awards Bachelor of Arts and Bachelor of Science in Engineering degrees, and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (1900), which awards Master of Arts and Ph.D. degrees.2 Yale and Princeton Women before Coeducation Women have attended Yale since the nineteenth century, principally as graduate students in the School of Fine Arts. In 1886, Alice Rufie Blake Jordan was the first woman to receive a Yale degree—in law. However, the Law School then shut the door on women until 1919. The Yale Graduate School of Arts and Sciences increased the number of women from one student in 1892, to around 25 percent by the 1960s. In the majority of the professional schools, women tended to average about 10 percent or slightly higher, which suggested an informal gender quota. Yale first raised the issue of coeducation at the undergraduate level when, in 1953, admissions dean Arthur Howe suggested to the faculty that admitting women might benefit the university, given that a majority of its applicants were from public, rather than from all-male private schools. Then, in 1962, Yale College faculty agreed with the report of the President’s Committee on the Freshman Year, chaired by psychology professor Leonard W. Doob, that the university “had a national duty to provide the rigorous training for women that we supply for men.” However, alumni were cool to the suggestion that Yale admit women, an issue that President Alfred Whitney Griswold’s death bequeathed to his successor, Kingman Brewster Jr.3 Princeton had no women graduate students until much later than Yale. In 1961, Mary Bunting...