From Coeducation to Equality

During the 1968 campus uprising at Columbia, nearly half the students who "liberated" university buildings were girls from Barnard College. But while the men mounted the barricades, the women mostly sat in the back rooms, cranking out leaflets or making peanut-butter sandwiches. Many of them resolved then and there never again to defer to male "machismo trippers." Since that time, the cause of Women's Lib in academe has flourished. Next to local voting rights, it is now the most visible cause on major campuses that otherwise seem free of controversy and revolt this year.

The basic argument of the liberationists is that coeducation is a sham unless it means genuine equality. The issue has been raised particularly on once all-male campuses that have recently gone coed. Last week, as Dartmouth became the last Ivy League school to drop its all-male tradition, trustees voted to admit coeds at a 4-to-l ratio of men to women, a standard similar to that followed by Yale and Princeton. Rather than being delighted with the change, many coeds argue that the quota system is demeaning and condemns them to second-class status on campus. Female academics favored proposed amendments to federal college-aid bills that would have required all coed schools to do away with quotas entirely within seven years. The amendment was defeated early last month after vigorous lobbying by many Ivy schools, which prefer to integrate at a slower pace. Harvard's new president, Derek Bok, for example, recently called for changing his university's 4-to-l ratio to 2.5-to-1 by 1975.

Condescending Ptlronage. Women's colleges are having their own second thoughts about going coed. Last month Mount Holyoke joined such other notable girls' schools as Wellesley, Smith, Sweet Briar and Wells in deciding to admit men only on a strictly limited basis. Feminism is partly the explanation.

Women's colleges are now sending potential applicants a propaganda brochure prepared by an association of Southern women's schools. It argues that on most coed campuses, women "experience the condescending patronage of a male-dominated society."

Tactics employed to counter male dominance vary. Last spring two of Princeton's newly admitted female undergraduates tried to expand campus awareness of "female sensitivity" by invading a male student's room and slashing his collection of 40 Playboy pinups. (A faculty-student board put the slashers on probation.) At Harvard, women are complaining to faculty members who persist in beginning lectures to mixed groups of Harvard and Radcliffe students with "Good morning, gentlemen." Activists at the University of Oregon are trying to make departments change the symbolically objectionable titles of courses like "Man and His Environment." to "The Human Environment." Stanford women are taking non-credit courses in car repair, and liberationists at Berkeley have organized informal classes in karate. The result, according to one Berkeley woman, is that "men here are a little less likely now to try something with a woman." Fifteen members of the Women's Activist Movement at Wisconsin last week marched into the university's "red gym," hitherto reserved exclusively for men, and demanded the right to use the basketball courts and the showers. So far, they have been allowed to play but not wash.

Who's Who. Almost every major U.S. campus has at least one cell of activist undergraduates who lobby (among other things) for day-care centers, abortion counseling and free contraceptives. Another demand is new courses in "womanities." On dozens of campuses, "women's studies" programs now include courses on literature written by women, economic studies of the woman's role in the marketplace and seminars on the psychology of women. A few of the pressure groups are openly lesbian in orientation. But, says Bonnie Strote, a member of several groups at the University of Washington, "It's getting difficult to tell who's gay and who's straight. A community is growing up of women who are relating so well together that they love each other and hug each other but aren't gay."

The activist groups include large numbers of female teachers as well as students. They have found a common cause in the persistence of discrimination against educated women in scores of jobs, a pattern that Oregon feminists derisively call the "Sally-secretary-sex-symbol syndrome." The most obvious problem is right on campus. Women are seldom promoted to senior faculty rank and are often paid less than men with the same level of responsibility and experience. At Stanford, a women's group has tartly pointed out that the School of Education has no female administrators and only four women among its 42 professors.

Action Plans. Detailed complaints from women's groups have helped pressure the U.S. Department of Health, Education and Welfare into warning 35 universities that they are discriminating in their hiring practices. Most of the campuses have filed "affirmative action plans" promising to do better. Brown, which had 11 tenured female professors in 1969, how has 14. At the University of Wisconsin, 636 female instructors and administrators are getting "women's equity" salary adjustments, a policy that the federal Pay Board has approved.

Still, many campuses are moving too slowly to suit women--or HEW. Last month HEW threatened to take steps leading to cancellation of Columbia's $55 million in federal research contracts, because the university had failed to prove that it was going ahead with its action plan. Despite last week's Supreme Court ruling on women's financial rights (see THE LAW), feminists are sure that even more pressure will be necessary to fulfill their goals--and are prepared to keep the pressure on.

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