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9. A Religious and a Public University: The Transitions to Coeducation at Georgetown and Rutgers
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221 9 A Religious and a Public University The Transitions to Coeducation at Georgetown and Rutgers Susan L. Poulson Like many other colleges and universities in the country, Georgetown and Rutgers Universities admitted women to their Colleges of Arts and Sciences for the first time in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Yet the reasons they adopted coeducation differed because of their public and private status and their internal constituencies. Their preparation for coeducation, however, was largely similar in that both had a narrow conception of how to welcome women. The history of coeducation is filled with examples of admitting women with little change to an existing campus culture, but at Georgetown and Rutgers the arrival of women students during a period of changing gender ideals in American society spawned a student culture that blurred traditional gender norms and roles. The Reasons for Going Coed Georgetown and Rutgers felt the same pressures to admit women that prevailed throughout American higher education in the 1960s and 1970s. The political climate made it increasingly unpopular to exclude any group merely on the basis of social distinction. The civil rights movement prompted many Americans to question the traditional social order. As one Rutgers College professor commented: “It is wrong for blacks to be segregated from whites, and it is just as wrong for whites to be segregated rom [sic] whites. Women should have the right to attend any college, and not be discriminated against because of their sex.”1 Faculty members favored coeducation for another reason: tuition benefits for their daughters. They enjoyed free tuition for their offspring, but the single-sex nature of the institution meant that only their sons could gain access to the colleges.2 Administrators were aware that the majority of male students wanted coeducation. A 1968 poll of male secondary students indicated that 78 perCoingCoedFinalPages .indd 221 5/26/04 4:54:11 PM 222 Structural Issues cent favored coeducational colleges while only 5 percent preferred single-sex schools. A 1969 Notre Dame study of its own students found that nearly a third of students who were accepted but did not enroll cited its single-sex status as the reason, and 72 percent of Notre Dame students indicated that they had thought about transferring to a coeducational school.3 When pollsters asked Princeton students “If Princeton were to remain all-male, would you advise an academically qualified younger brother to accept admission?,” 22 percent of the freshman class and 56 percent of the senior class said “no.” Finally, in the perennial quest for academic prestige, people at Georgetown and Rutgers saw that even elite institutions were coeducational. Rutgers administrators and faculty watched nearby Princeton as it first debated and then adopted coeducation in the late 1960s.4 Georgetown was in the midst of becoming a nationally competitive, highly regarded institution, drawing students from beyond its traditional Catholic constituency. While the Catholic tradition had a long heritage of single-sex education, Georgetown’s peer institutions outside the Catholic system of higher education were considering admitting women or were already coeducational. Beyond these similarities, however, Georgetown had an additional reason for adopting coeducation that Rutgers did not. Financial pressures weighed heavily on Georgetown. Caught between rising costs and stagnating revenue, it sought to expand its largest source of income: tuition. In 1968, the academic vice president, Rev. Thomas Fitzgerald, S.J., wrote that the administration was “anxious” to admit at least 50 girls to the college in 1969 and to increase slightly undergraduate enrollment “to support the large number of academic programs already in existence and to help assimilate the operating costs of the new Library.”5 As a state-supported university, Rutgers felt no such pressures. It had the financial backing of the state legislature, which at the time placed no pressure to cut costs. The Paths to Coeducation While Rutgers and Georgetown adopted coeducation during the same period of time, there was little similarity in how they made the decision. The differences stem from the nature of the institutions. As a multifaceted state university, Rutgers had to accommodate internal constituencies. At Georgetown, which had a centralized administration and no internal constituencies opposed to coeducation, the decision to adopt coeducation was relatively easy. In the 1960s, Rutgers University was one of the few state institutions in the country that still retained single-sex education. In the mid-eighteenth century, when the Dutch Reformed Church established Rutgers as a college “for young men destined for...