Challenged by Coeducation: Women's Colleges Since the 1960s

6. Wells College: The Transition to Coeducation Begins

145 6 Wells College The Transition to Coeducation Begins Leslie Miller-Bernal Since opening in 1868, Wells College has remained remarkably the same in several respects. It is a very small college with close, familylike ties among members of the academic community;1 the setting in Aurora, New York, continues to be rural, with the college situated in a village of fewer than a thousand people on the eastern shores of Lake Cayuga, twenty miles from the nearest small city, Auburn; the curriculum is traditional liberal arts, with education as the only preprofessional program; and the college is still a women’s college. And yet Wells is different today from the college that students of just thirtyfive years ago knew. Today’s students are no longer predominantly wealthy, and many more belong to racial and ethnic minorities. Admissions are less selective, student retention is a matter of concern, and the college seems less up-to-date, as no new buildings have been constructed on campus for about thirty years, although some have undergone renovations. Such changes pale in comparison to the major change the board of trustees announced in October 2004: Beginning in fall 2005, men students would be admitted. This chapter examines the attempts of Wells College to respond effectively to the educational challenges of the last third of the twentieth century, when almost all formerly men’s colleges became coeducational and many women’s colleges admitted men. Problems with enrollments and finances led the college to implement such innovative ideas as a women’s leadership institute and dramatic tuition cuts, but the same problems resurfaced. My basic argument is that while remaining a women’s college pleased internal constituencies and avoided conflict, only admitting men has the potential to resolve the college’s structural difficulties. In discussing events at Wells College, particularly from 2003 to 2005, I have 146 Women’s Colleges That Have Become Coeducational or Have Closed utilized an insider’s perspective, as well as official documents. Not only am I a senior faculty member at the college, but given that my recent research has dealt with single-sex and coeducational institutions, and the transition of some colleges from the former to the latter, I played an active role in the discussions of coeducation at Wells. Indeed, the trustees read some professional papers I had written, and I was asked to speak to them and to the larger college community about my research. The Beginnings Similar to Vassar College, which opened just three years earlier, Wells College owes its existence to a businessman with no experience with higher education. Henry Wells (1805–78), the founder of Wells, Fargo and Company, lived in the small village of Aurora. One of Wells’s friends was Ezra Cornell, who planned to establish a university in Ithaca, about twenty-five miles south. Although Cornell tried to encourage his friend to establish a college for women as part of Cornell University, Wells wanted to found his own institution. Wells Seminary and Cornell University both opened in 1868, Wells with just 36 women and Cornell with 412 men.2 Wells had the title of seminary only for its first two years, but it retained the characteristics of a seminary longer. Strict rules, even bells, regulated students’ lives. The curriculum was a mixture of secondary- and college-level work, taught at first by women who had no college degrees and a few male professors from Cornell. A majority of the students studied in the Preparatory Department; a minority completed the collegiate course. A key focus of the college was the refinement of its wealthy women students. Practical study was deemed un­ necessary, since students were not expected to earn their own living but rather to marry high-status men. The college required French, on the other hand, since it was believed to be indispensable for cultivated women. Wells offered many music and arts courses for similar reasons. Henry Wells’s strengths and limitations as the founder of the college had profound consequences for the way the college developed. On the one hand, Wells’s belief that women’s intellects were stunted by their lack of education fueled his desire to better their situation. In a speech he wrote for the inauguration of the college, he noted that while it was “commonly said” that a woman’s mind was “not capable of attaining to a high order of discipline,” he was “not acknowledging this” but rather wanted to “give her the opportunity.” And yet...