Cracking the Cloisters

After decades of single-sex living and learning, many of the top private campuses of the East have formally surrendered to coeducation. This fall Princeton has 151 girls, 101 of them freshmen and the rest transfer students from other colleges. Yale has accepted 588 women, including 230 freshmen. Vassar College boasts 91 new male undergraduates. Bennington College has taken in 33 men.

In addition, under the new Eleven-College Exchange Program, six Eastern men's colleges and five girls' colleges are swapping more than 200 students this year. While 59 girls attend Williams College, 28 Williams men have switched to the girls' schools. Smith has gained 28 men from Amherst, Dartmouth, Trinity, Wesleyan and Williams, but lost 73 of its regular students to men's colleges. A third of the Smithies are bound for Dartmouth, where they are being joined by 15 girls from Mount Holyoke, seven from Wheaton and three from Connecticut College.

To house its new coeds, Princeton has feminized Pyne Hall with curtains, washing machines and sewing machines; entry doors have been fitted with a lock and buzzer system. Smith's male students are quartered in two annexes to girl-occupied dorms. At Bennington, which last spring abolished all parietal restrictions, the men are living in coed campus houses.

Down with Hypocrisy. The last bastions of separate men's and women's education are crumbling because they cen no longer find enough bright applicants willing to endure four years of monastic isolation. After Bennington announced that it was going coed, applications for this year's freshman class rose 56% over last year--despite the fact that the college's tuition had been hiked an average of $475.

Most of the new coeds of both sexes share the sentiment of Al Gladstone, a senior 'from Trinity at Smith: "I came to get out of the weekend social life. I was fed up with the hypocrisy of that way of treating people." Academic reasons count too. Senior Roger Faix, for example, insists that he was lured away from Dartmouth by Smith's biology department. "I guess you could say I came to Smith to study hormones," he explains.

For some, the choice of campuses was a question of style. "I didn't really think that I was the Vassar type," says Wesleyan Junior Mark Merlis, an exchange student at Smith. He sees himself as "a male Julie Nixon" and thus feels that he will blend easily into the Smith ambience. For others, the choice reflected parental ambitions. Krisanne Warner, a dean's list student at Bucknell last year, reluctantly applied to Yale because her mother called it "the opportunity of the decade." Krisanne won admission to Yale--succeeding where both her father and brother had failed.

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