Bryn Mawr and Haverford

Bryn Mawr and Haverford Alison's part

1.History of Haverford:

-1833 liberal and guarded education for Quaker boys

-1870 the faculty and students had voted to go coed, Board of Managers did not concede (expansion was the answer but coeducation was not.)

continued cooperation with Bryn Mawr was the best choice for both schools/it was time for Haverford to prevent its identity from merging with Bryn Mawr's and to step out on its own as a coed institution.(???)

Fact: co-ed of Amherst: leave Haverford as one of the few remaining private, eastern liberal arts colleges to retain an all-male student body. “

-1977 The Board implemented the decision to admit women as transfers starting in the following fall.

-1980 coed: academic quality and economic crisis are the catalyst

 Haverford's financial state was in jeopardy if it did not expand in size and single sex prohibiting 50% of the population in an expansion would decrease the caliber of students at Haverford

Fact: In early February of 1978, the students of Haverford voted 387-90 with 59 students abstaining to go fully coed. In 1980, 400 women applied for the first Haverford coed class, comprising 29% of the total applicants. Dean of Admissions, William Ambler stated, "I can tell you it's going to be a dynamite class of freshmen next year.”

2. Debate:

-Support: Cooperation doesn't seem to be working as well as we'd like. We can continue the bi-co cooperation with coeducation.

-Against: 

End of the corporation between two campus:

e.g: end of dorm exchange and death to the cross majoring proposal, a 3-1 student female-male ratio and a Bryn Mawr administration that felt (and quite rightly) that it had been betrayed by Haverford.

Bryn Mawr's survival

inevitability of Haverford and Bryn Mawr competing for the same candidates

Haverford’s environment

“It appears virtually certain that through one plan or another, Haverford will soon be admitting women. But is the Haverford community really ready to welcome women into it as students? Those concerned with the college's finances are also eager to have women to increase enrollment and college revenues. But it is not so obvious that women admitted to Haverford would feel comfortable and be treated as intellectual equals vis a vis Haverford men.”

3. The reason to be co-ed:

-In an expert from an interview in 1972 to The News, John Coleman(the president of Haverford): ”The major issue to which we are speaking is not coeducation; it is the survival of the College in distinction. The economics are pushing this College to a far greater extent that I had realized even a few months ago.”

-Neither the Board nor John Coleman had ever singled out the question of what it meant to have women at Haverford. And the Board admitted to their lack of response in the area of gender issues.

  admitted that the "moral argument" which maintains that Haverford has no right to deny full education to women  was left unanswered. It argued that "other issues were more compelling”

-The reason for this lack of interest of gender politics:  the nature of Haverford and Bryn Mawr as educational institutions. 

Bryn Mawr's relationship with the question of gender was similar to that of Haverford's prior to 1970: both schools filled a need as expressed by society. Haverford began as a school for the education of Quaker young men and Bryn Mawr began as a counterpart to such as school, but for the opposite sex.

 "...the concept of gender has long been treated as the by-product of changing economic structures; gender has had no independent analytic status of its own.” Joan Wallach Scott "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.”

 

4. Effect to Bryn Mawr:

-Bryn Mawr was obligated to maintain gender as its focal point in their position on coeducation. Bryn Mawr's existence as a College would become further based on gender once Haverford went coed.

-Prior to Haverford's coeducation decision, Bryn Mawr was able to remain respected as a College without the definition as a "women's school.” (But HC becomes an "American" college and Bryn Mawr has become a College for women.)

-This is due to a commonly accepted definition of women's schools: women's schools were where women went to think like men. Suddenly, Bryn Mawr in 1980 was forced, despite pleading to avoid it, into a reevaluation of identity because women now had the opportunity to go elsewhere to think like men. Bryn Mawr found itself involuntarily taking on the definition of a school where women could be free to think like women.

-Dorm

-Even thought there is no exact number of the students living in exchanged dorm, but the archive work indicates that “many students live in the other campus”. 

Women and men lived at both campuses in order to get more of a coed experience before 1980

 “The options in Bryn Mawr and Haverford gives students more chooses. In the early years Bryn Mawr is innovative to let students live together”

 -The Tri-Co Exchange is for students interested in living at Haverford or Swarthmore College.  In order to have an exchange, there must be an equal number of students from Haverford or Swarthmore who want to live at Bryn Mawr and students from Bryn Mawr who want to live at Haverford or Swarthmore.  Because of this, the number of students in the exchange varies from year to year.  Historically the number of Bryn Mawr students living at Haverford or Swarthmore ranges from 0 - 4.

-According to results of a poll released by the anthropology department, in 1970’’,  the survey indicated that a majority of those living in coed dorms might not have come to Bryn Mawr if Haverford admitted women." 

In 2009, there is an article called Lone male student rooms at Bryn Mawr:

James Merriam, the Man in Bryn Mawr: attends Haverford originally but decide to go to Bryn Mawr

Reasons: serious roommate problems, liberal Quaker campus wasn't quite as liberal as he had hoped, the food and facilities to be less than stellar.

There is more limitation imposed on the connection of the two campus

5. Stereotype in the past

-Haverford male listed four common stereotypes of Bryn Mawr women.

"BMC women are too intellectual, Bryn Mawr girls study twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, 365 days a year, BMC girls hate guys, Bryn Mawr girls really aren't girls.”

-Though coeducation existed, the identities of the colleges never wavered as a men's school and a female school respectively. The separation between the sexes is evident in the student's widely accepted stereotypes of each other.