Where the Brains Are

Hardly anyone imagines girls attending mighty M.I.T. Yet last week Tech, as Boston calls it, dedicated its first women's dormitory to go with its first women's dean, an attractive blonde lured from nearby Radcliffe. As it turns out, Tech has 238 girls--all swimming fast and straight in a sea of 6,860 men.

Girls at M.I.T. go back to 1871, when an uppity Vassar grad applied to study chemistry. The faculty let her in, but carefully kept her name (Ellen Swallow) off the rolls. She wound up on the faculty, and in 1883 the whole place went coed--turning out such alumnae as Battleship Designer Lydia G. Weld ('02) and City Planner Elisabeth Coit ('18). More than half of Tech's living alumnae work fulltime as artists, aerodynamicists, doctors, ministers, missile developers and math professors. Still, the total number is small--only 572 women hold M.I.T. degrees.

Elegant Equations. One reason is that high schools have steered girls away from M.I.T. for years. Many seem to be unaware that the place is coed; others put it down as misogynist, or too tough. Few know that M.I.T. offers humanities courses, and well-taught ones, too. And there is the lingering Boston image of the Tech coed as "a girl five feet tall and equally wide, a slide rule hanging at her belt, who can speak only in differential equations."

The only truth in this picture is that Tech girls have brains. They consistently do as well as or better than the boys. All take the same standard freshman calculus and chemistry; most wind up majoring in math or science. As for looks, Tech now boasts striking equations--long legs, wind-blown hair, fresh faces--attached to creatures who turn out to be working on doctorates in fluid dynamics while researching hydrofoils for the Navy.

"Deep People." Tech girls have problems. "You feel like a cow at auction," says one. "You have to walk a mile to find a ladies' room," says another. But over the years they have made a virtue of their small numbers. "We're a powerful minority," says 19-year-old Sue Colodny. The only girl in a class gets plenty of professorial attention. "Every activity on campus wants girls," gloats one of them, and a freshman reports that getting a date required only the merest smile. "It's wild," she says.

What makes it sound wilder is that Tech girls can visit Tech boys in their rooms for at least six hours a day (traffic the other way is restricted). The visits are mainly devoted to the "study date," a circumspect Tech tradition born of the pace as well as the propinquity. Tech girls adore "deep people." They scorn "meats" (inarticulate athletes), and go for "tools" (grinds) only if they can be "unlocked" (relaxed). That still leaves plenty of minds to meet: about 40% of Tech girls marry Techmen--much preferring them to Harvardmen, who are "all the same."

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