All-Women College Protests Male Admissions

[ethics]

More than a third of Wells College's all-female student body protested trustees' decision admit male students Sunday, sleeping in the lobby of the administration building or in the 15 tents set up on the lawn outside.

About 170 students protested for a second day after Saturday's decision to admit men to the 400-student school beginning next year.

Students in this Finger Lakes village will continue to protest until the board reverses its decision, said sophomore Rachel Crosbie. Opponents say they want to preserve the college's 136-year tradition as a school for women, and worry men may dominate the classroom if they are admitted.

College President Lisa Marsh Ryerson said she met with students Saturday and Sunday and told them Wells is committed to going coed.

"This is just a day after the decision was announced, and the entire community is working through a range of responses to the decision," she said.

Students papered the hallways inside Macmillan Hall with signs that read: "Coeducation Silences Women" and "Single-sex Education is Alive and Wells." They kept busy Sunday at the protest site, reading, doing homework, planning their strategy and occasionally singing protest songs.

Here's my issue with this.

While I support gender split schools, I don't think the reasons given here by the students are valid. Coeducation Silences Women?! How is allowing boys in to College silences women? Are they being forced to keep quiet by the males or the administration?

[MNeedham73]

Talk about your double standards. Sheesh. :thumbdown

[LissaKay]

Here's my issue with this.

While I support gender split schools, I don't think the reasons given here by the students are valid. Coeducation Silences Women?! How is allowing boys in to College silences women? Are they being forced to keep quiet by the males or the administration?

I should probably just shoot myself in the head rather than answer this, since the answer defies description, even when I was able to make my meaning come through my written words ....

There IS a difference. It is subtle and impossible to define, but it is there. I have taken all-female classes and co-ed classes from high school level through college. In the all-female situations, I felt, and I think I can speak for those long-ago classmates, more validated, more recognized, more respected.

Even today, in co-ed situations in work-training and other classes I have taken recently ... I can make a statement, present an idea or ask a question, and be met with scorn. It is subtle, but I can still sense it. A male classmate can make the same observation or ask the same question, and he gets a much different response. When the teacher/trainer is male, the difference is even more apparent.

This, more than any other factor, is what is making me hesitate in returning to college to complete my degree. I just do not have the strength of ego to be able to tolerate this kind of treatment. I have flash-backs to paramedic school and the trauma is more than I can handle ... not the stress of the job, or the blood and guts ... but the way the teachers treated not only me, but all of the females in that class. I never felt such humiliation and degradation in my life. The nine weeks of training I went through for this job in insurance was much the same ... the trainer treated some of us females like shit. The ones he didn't were the ones that sat there twirling their hair and batting their eyelashes. (A year later and none of them are still here though)

I guess it's just one of those things where you have to experience it to understand ...

[ethics]

Depends on the course, Lissa, but I wouldn't discount your perception. I've felt the same thing except in the opposite sense. It may be true (because I have not felt this taking these classes) for science and math, but for liberal arts, guys are dead meat when they compete with females.

Forget about the amount of time that's devoted to females over males in writing courses--and I took many of them in different ways (online and physically being there). Same goes for music, art, and other topics like poetry.

In my humble opinion, they pan out and balance each other out.

And let me add that what you do with that bias is what makes/breaks a person. I always love being an underdog, it inspires and motivates me. Hell, I would say these types of motivations is what got me to what I am today.

[RRedline]

Depends on the course, Lissa, but I wouldn't discount your perception. I've felt the same thing except in the opposite sense. It may be true (because I have not felt this taking these classes) for science and math, but for liberal arts, guys are dead meat when they compete with females.I experienced this a little bit as well back when I was in college. I remember thinking how very few of the women (I know this sounds sexist, but it's the truth) in my math, science and computer courses were able to pull their weight as much as the men did. There were exceptions, of course. In fact, there was a woman in many of my upper level math courses who was very clearly a mathematical genius, above everybody else in the classes, including me. In other classes, especially writing, literature, music, etc., it was the women who seemed more motivated and understood the subject material better than the men. I also distinctly remember a femi-nazi, female professor I had for an anthropology course. She went out of her way to make men, especially white men, feel responsible for just about every problem in the world.

I'm sure that a lot of the time, people don't realize a gender bias in teaching unless they are on the wrong end of it.

[Copzilla]

I wonder then if women will permit West Point to resume its all-male status it once had?

[SixofNine]

Money is probably rearing its head in this issue, too. I'll bet that the vast majority of colleges and universities below the elite few are in cutthroat competition for students. All-male and all-female schools no longer want to cut off half of their potential source of revenue.

Too bad, because I can certainly understand Lissa's point, especially given the first-hand experience upon which it's based. Besides, let's face it: generally speaking, men are still the pursuers and women the pursued. I could certainly understand that there is a subset of the female population who want to be in an academic environment in which they don't get hit on constantly, just as I can understand that there are other women who would thrive on such attention and love going to a coed school.

Brian

[Stiofán]

Lissa, while I understand your concern, cannot an argument be made that these experiences (not your personal ones) do allow both men and woman to better prepare for what they will face in the real world. Business is so cut throat, you must be able to handle different BS just to survive. College must not only teach the rote theoretical but also prepare us socially for interaction later in life.

[LissaKay]

The differences I see are based on gender and how each is reacted to in the same situation. As I mentioned before, many times ... too many times, I would raise my hand and ask a question or offer an observation or idea only to be met with derision or scorn ... very subtle - a raised eyebrow, a smirk, a tone of voice that says, "Whateverrrrrr!"

That alone is not the problem. The problem starts when a male classmate would ask the same question, or present the same idea and he would get an enthusiastic response. "Great idea, John!" And I would be sitting there, in shock, bewilderment and frustration, because I had just said the very same thing.

I am smart, I am articulate, I don't speak out until I have thought it through carefully and with great consideration. Yet, too many times, I have been smacked down only to watch someone else receive kudos for the same thing I had presented earlier.

That is but one reason why I sympathize with and understand where the ladies of Wells' College are coming from.

[cdw]

Must be difficult for people who choose a college for being an all-woman or all-man setting and it gets changed in midstream.

[ethics]

Sounds like you got dissed in a bad school by a bad teacher. I've never seen that happen in all of the time I've attended school. I think other guys would even start questioning the teacher right there and there.

Maybe it's a Southern thing?

[ethics]

Must be difficult for people who choose a college for being an all-woman or all-man setting and it gets changed in midstream.


That's a very good point.

[LissaKay]

It wasn't in just one school, or even just in a school/training environment at all. I get this in the everyday work world too.

Mebbe a southern thang ... and a SoCali-raised gal like me just don't fit the mold. Could also be that I appear to be a sweet lil thing you'd expect to be twirling hair, batting lashes and giggling, and then I let loose the full force of my personality ... cognitive dissonance there, indeed.

But it happens too often, in too many situations to not notice a pattern. And it is not just me that I have seen receive this kind of treatment ... I've witnessed it happening to other women as well. But never in a group of only women ...

I think there is some kind of gender dynamic, maybe something as basic as pheromones, that occurs in co-ed groups that makes us almost instinctually revert to dominant/submissive roles ... with the exception of rogues like me.

[ethics]

I think there is some kind of gender dynamic, maybe something as basic as pheromones, that occurs in co-ed groups that makes us almost instinctually revert to dominant/submissive roles ... with the exception of rogues like me.


Would be interested in real scientific research (no political correctness agenda) here.

I can't doubt what you state but I offer my sympathies. I know exactly how that feels not from the gender base but as a minority.

[Stiofán]

There are differences around the country. A woman's place is in the home and all that load.

You've only got one life and it's yours so don't let some jerks dictate your educational choices. That stuff just shows their ignorance.

[ethics]

Back to topic.

Since this IS a private institution, the students can't do much except take their money and go elsewhere. Perhaps a law suit to get some of their money back but not much else.

West Point is subsidized by the Federal government, so I believe that's a little bit different. I also feel that any male OR female that can cut the mustard in the training at WP deserves to be there IF and only IF same set of rules are applied to men and women.

[joseftu]

Must be difficult for people who choose a college for being an all-woman or all-man setting and it gets changed in midstream.
Yes, that would be a problem.

What if I wanted to go to BYU (thinking of another thread), and you chose it because I knew about and admired the strict rules and atmosphere--and then suddenly they decided to start having keg parties every Friday. I think I'd be justified in conducting a protest or two!

[ethics]

Yes, that would be a problem.

What if I wanted to go to BYU (thinking of another thread), and you chose it because I knew about and admired the strict rules and atmosphere--and then suddenly they decided to start having keg parties every Friday. I think I'd be justified in conducting a protest or two!

Sure. My post was not about the protests per se, but the logic of the protest, and speficifically one banner. Lissa then went ahead and focused on that thought and explain it from her point of view.

[joseftu]

Yes, I think Lissa's explanation was quite valuable--as was Cyd's point that I was responding to.

I don't know of any studies of this phenomenon in higher education (but many studies in the elementary and middle school years bear it out), but I've heard it reported anecdotally many times. I know that female students who reach my classroom after having attended all-girl high schools tend (I'm generalizing) to be more academically prepared, more confident, less easily-distracted, and more able to deal with the social situations inside and outside the classroom.

As I said, though, this is a giant generalization--far from scientific. But it's been persuasive enough to me personally that I do think there is quite a bit of value in at least having all-female schools as an option. They're almost certainly not a necessity, and not right for everyone, but I think it's pretty clear that they can be a positive choice, and an alternative option, for many young (or not-so-young) women.

[ethics]

I don't know of any studies of this phenomenon in higher education (but many studies in the elementary and middle school years bear it out), but I've heard it reported anecdotally many times. I know that female students who reach my classroom after having attended all-girl high schools tend (I'm generalizing) to be more academically prepared, more confident, less easily-distracted, and more able to deal with the social situations inside and outside the classroom.

I don't doubt this. I would even say that the all-boys school has similar benefits but more towards being able to concentrate on the school work.

[joseftu]

Yep, you could be right. Studies I've seen of younger kids do seem to indicate that boys benefit too (in different ways) from being segregated from girls in the elementary and middle school years.

I don't think I've really encountered many students myself who went to all-boy schools, though (a few lapsed Chasidim--but they're another whole story!).

[warlock56]

Lonely guys who can't get any and are desperate deserve a chance at getting laid just like everyone else. ;)

[ethics]

Yep, you could be right. Studies I've seen of younger kids do seem to indicate that boys benefit too (in different ways) from being segregated from girls in the elementary and middle school years.

I don't think I've really encountered many students myself who went to all-boy schools, though (a few lapsed Chasidim--but they're another whole story!).


Had plenty of friends who went to Farrell (http://www.msgrfarrellhs.org/). Academically, they kicked our asses every year.

[Misu]

I wonder then if women will permit West Point to resume its all-male status it once had?

Not that I don't agree with you, Copz, but I think we need to make a fair comparison here.

This little podunk school has competition of the same caliber - there already are co-ed schools at the same level of this all-girl school.

West Point, as far as I know, doesn't have this kind of competition. There are no schools of the caliber of West Point which are either all female or co-ed.

Guys wanting to go to Well's college have the option of going to other schools that are co-ed, and receive the same education. Women wanting to attend West Point have no place else but West Point to receive the kind of education West Point offers.

Personally, I think private schools can do whatever they want as long as they're not receiving any sort of federal money. If they want to remain single-sex, then let them stay single-sex. If they want co-ed, by all means. With the number of schools out there, it's not like it's impossible to get an education these days.

[Copzilla]

Since this IS a private institution, the students can't do much except take their money and go elsewhere. Perhaps a law suit to get some of their money back but not much else.

West Point is subsidized by the Federal government, so I believe that's a little bit different.
Somebody needs to inform the women, then, that Augusta is a private institution.

My entire point is that you can't cry for exclusivity citing you need to be without men in order to fully realize your potential, without recognizing that men also need their insitutions exclusive of women.

Personally, I'm in favor of both - places just for women, and places just for men.