Rather Dead than Coed

Since we're talking in class about gathering data and giving evidence to back up our claims, you all might be interested in giving a close-reading to the recent Science magazine article on The Pseudoscience of Single-Sex Education. Particularly interesting in this regard is Jane McAuliffe's response to the report: that women's colleges "buck the trend" of women avoiding science, and the further reflections of one of my gender studies students....

Thanks for bringing this up! I read the article and many of the comments last week with some friends and fellow BMC students and have been wanted a chance to discuss it further.

I'm not sure how the comments connect back to issues of class, exactly, but I do think in terms of censorship the article and comments on it are really great to look at. I'd agree that many of the students and alumni posting responses didn't censor their thoughts very much – if they censored them at all. I think this was simply a result of the general anonymity most of the commentators hid under. There was very little accountability to be found in responses to the article which I found disheartening. I think there's a fine line between censoring one's opinion to the detriment of honesty and saying exactly what's on one's mind at all times. I think the former is always bad, but sometimes the latter can be good – it gets people's feelings into the open and allows them to be addressed. However, I do think some measure of sensitivity should exist. I felt that comments which accused Ms. Chu of things unrelated to the content of her work (some comments suggested she was one of the students who was "taking a bus to other schools on the weekends to do unmentionable things") were uncalled for and immature. I also think the sweeping generalizations Ms. Chu made about BMC weren't fair and because they were based off a single experience, should have been more clearly labelled as not every student's women's college experience.

Her apology raises some really interesting topics though – including the way many women from women's colleges are viewed and whether or not that should garner any importance. I personally think that her stories outlining condescending behavior from students outside of BMC show exactly why women's colleges are still necessary.  Kady Ashcraft's response article in this week's College News (The Intimacy Issue) does a very good job of stating the necessity of women's colleges: "...think of Bryn Mawr not as an environment absent of men, but one forging new ground on female terms." She ends her response by saying: "Until men can understand that they are not the standard onto which I strive, ... until society can put as much emphasis on a girl being valedictorian as they do on her being homecoming queen, until I am earning dollar on dollar with any white man... there is a purpose for women to be learning and living at Bryn Mawr College." I think these kinds of responses are more appropriate than a lot of the commentary found on Ms. Chu's article, while remaining uncensored and opinionated.