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10. Coeducation after a Decade of Coordination: The Case of Hamilton College
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245 10 Coeducation after a Decade of Coordination The Case of Hamilton College Leslie Miller-Bernal Coordination between a men’s and a women’s college has existed in the United States since 1879 when the “Annex,” later called Radcliffe, enabled some women to receive instruction from Harvard professors. While only a few institutions of higher education have ever had a coordinate structure, in the mid-1960s there were still some well-known coordinate colleges, including Pembroke and Brown, Barnard and Columbia, Radcliffe and Harvard, Sophie Newcomb and Tulane, and Douglass and Rutgers. In 1966 Hamilton College, a small, private liberal arts college for men in Clinton, New York, announced that it was establishing a women’s coordinate college. This decision did not seem particularly unusual for the time, but the type of women’s college that was founded—a progressive or innovative college—was more exceptional. After only ten years of operation, Hamilton College absorbed this women’s college, Kirkland, and Hamilton became coeducational in the more typical sense. This chapter discusses how and why Hamilton College decided to found Kirkland and the reasons Hamilton became coeducational a decade later. It seems that coeducation , after even a brief period of coordination, can have benefits for women students, despite coordination and coeducation being instituted primarily with men’s interests in mind. Hamilton as a Traditional Men’s College Founded in 1812 and loosely affiliated with the Presbyterian Church during most of the nineteenth century, Hamilton College had a reputation for being academically sound and conservative. Like at other small, private liberal arts colleges for men, many of Hamilton’s early graduates became ministers, but by the early twentieth century, a majority entered secular professions. The CoingCoedFinalPages.indd 245 5/26/04 4:54:18 PM 246 Structural Issues curriculum at Hamilton was traditional, with an emphasis on the classics, but gradually broadened to allow students to choose electives, within limits (even as late as 1968, Hamilton offered neither sociology nor performing arts majors). The student body was homogeneous, consisting mostly of white middle-class Protestants of northern European ancestry. Social life at Hamilton centered on fraternities, and football and ice hockey were popular sports. Hamilton seemed similar to many tradition-bound men’s liberal arts colleges in the northeastern United States. World War II and its aftermath affected even this rural, idyllic campus. A lay president during the war years tried without much success to introduce some innovations in Hamilton’s curriculum. But the biggest changes occurred during the halcyon years of the 1960s, when the federal government and foundations gave money to encourage the growth of higher education. Hamilton College faced the issue of how to grow without losing the advantages of smallness. President Robert McEwen also wished to stimulate Hamilton in order to keep up with the modern world.1 The Idea for a Coordinate Women’s College In the early 1960s, Hamilton’s trustees established their first ever Long-Range Planning Committee. One educational concept that appealed to trustees and administrators was the “cluster” concept, in which a college established other colleges nearby that had somewhat unique focuses or specialties. Members of the planning group traveled to Oxford University, College of the Pacific, and Santa Cruz to learn more about clusters.2 President McEwen was particularly enamored of this idea and proposed that Hamilton establish a cluster of about five colleges in order to have a “lively impact” on Hamilton. Each college was to be separately organized, with its own faculty, president, trustees, and definition of purpose. In that way, Hamilton would remain small but would still achieve “educational flexibility.”3 For about seven years, Hamilton engaged in a great deal of planning around the college cluster idea. A key question to be settled was which type of college should be established first. An early planning document discussed many possibilities but saw problems with all but a women’s college. A denominational college for Friends or Presbyterians, for example, was dismissed because religious bodies would probably not be interested in establishing a college that “would basically be subordinate to Hamilton.” A progressive or experimental college, dubbed “College John Dewey,” was likewise rejected because it would be “prickly—perhaps exasperating—as a neighbor” and besides, why not just pick and choose the better features of the experimental college for Hamilton itself?4 Given Kirkland’s later experiences as a progressive women’s college, these sentiments about “College John Dewey” would...