Monday, November 13, 2006
Going coed subverts educational beliefs
From the RoundTable blog
Read the latest entries
Arthur R. Poskocil
Poskocil lives in Roanoke.
In 1987, Wheaton College in Massachusetts informed its students and alumnae that it would become coeducational. The furor fomented by this announcement was heightened by the fact that the college had just successfully completed a major capital campaign explicitly premised on eliciting support for Wheaton as a college for women.
Many alumnae expressed their outrage by demanding that their gifts to the college be returned. Their contributions, as they saw it, had been obtained under false pretenses.
Hoping to placate its students and alumnae, Wheaton hired a research organization to come on campus, during its initial year of coeducation, to assess the teaching-learning process at the college. They were apparently confident that it would be ascertained that the women of Wheaton were not being educationally shortchanged as a result of the switch to coeducation.
It should have worked. Women students then still outnumbered men by 4 to 1, and many of Wheaton's faculty cared deeply about women's education and, of course, had until that year directed their teaching efforts exclusively to women.
However, their gambit backfired. TV cameras were brought into classrooms to record the teaching and learning experience, and the results were shocking. What was occurring in those Wheaton College classrooms was, in a nutshell, that the male students quickly conditioned their professors to call on them for critical analysis.
Men are bolder in classroom discussion and quicker to raise their hands whether or not they have fully formed their ideas in response to a question. They ad lib.
Women are generally more circumspect and consequently likely to think for some moments before volunteering to comment on a complex discussion issue. By the time the woman is ready to raise her hand, a male in the class already has the floor.
The result is, as the cameras at Wheaton testified, professors quickly learn where they will locate waving hands in response to a provocative question, and their own body language magnifies the gender gap as they, perhaps unconsciously, orient toward a male even as the question is posed.
What we get is, "When was the Battle of Hastings, Sarah?" "What was its significance, Brad?"
In addition to the support inadvertently provided by Wheaton, there is a great deal of evidence that single-sex education is uniquely beneficial to women. Women at such institutions learn better during their college years, and they are much more likely to play campus leadership roles than are women at coeducational institutions. Finally, they also succeed better in the world of business and professions than their coeducationally educated sisters.
Administrators and trustees at Randolph-Macon Women's College know all this. They, like Hollins University, my own institution, have for decades trumpeted these very real advantages to their current and prospective students.
I don't believe RMWC's leaders have changed their minds about the superiority of single-sex education. Rather, they fully understand that their decision subverts their educational beliefs.
The fear at every woman's college today is that the relatively tiny pool of high school students willing to consider a woman's college will keep shrinking and eventually possibly disappear altogether. If it actually is going to disappear, then only those colleges that opt for coeducation in time will survive. It is a very real dilemma, but the choice to opt for coeducation is also a very real betrayal of principle, but even more concretely of commitments made to the students already on your campus.
At RMWC next fall, three classes of its current students will have taken from them the very advantage that the college promised, in recruiting them, as its unique contribution to their education, indeed as its very mission.
RMWC, like Hollins, has a sizable enough endowment that it cannot justify its recent decision as necessary to its immediate survival. Rather it is making a bet, based on fear, on its long-term viability.
Is the fear justified? I hope not. Is the bet a defensible response to that fear? No.
