Barnard is also well-known for its militantly feminist student body. And despite the fairly normal sex ratio, Columbia-Barnard has one of the most open and active gay communities in North America.

Cornell

Officials of Cornell University are proud that when the school was founded in 1865, it became the first co-educational university in the country.

That, however, does not mean that Cornell's nearly 9000 undergraduates are divided equally. The male-female ration is about two to one, and Walter A. Snickenberger, dean of admissions and financial aid, says he wrestled the ratio down from three-to-one over the last 20 years.

In the school of arts and sciences--where co-education from a Harvard perspective perhaps counts the most--Cornell boasts nearly a one-to-one ratio amount about 3600 students. The slight majority belongs to the women.

What tips the scales in the undergraduate ratio is the predominance of males in the colleges of Agriculture and Life Sciences, of Engineering, of Hotel Administration, of Industry and Labor Relations, and of Architecture. The combined population of these schools is around 1500 students, with a three-to-one, male-dominated ratio.

Snickenberger's efforts might seem to be a token campaign to recruit women in these schools, but he bridles at the suggestion that quotas be set for female acceptances or that admissions be "slanted" in favor of women.

"We don't admit inferior girls simply to have more girls on campus," he says.

Elaine S. Povich, news editor of the Cornell Daily Sun and a senior, says that co-education hasn't been a big issue in Ithaca, N.Y., since women last year lobbied for and won the right to use the more splendid of the two athletic facilities--which was, naturally, the men's.

Nonetheless, Cornell harbors a chapter of the National Organization of Women and an active Women's Community Center.

Just because women can play basketball in the men's athletic facility two days a week doesn't mean the Bg Red have progressed that much, but Cornell got its progressive headstart 109 years ago.

Dartmouth

Even Dartmouth, the most staunchly male of all the Ivy League schools, went co-ed two years ago, although its reasons were more financial than ideological. Faced with increasing deficits and decreasing popularity, the Dartmouth trustees decided in 1972 to go to a year-round academic calendar and to increase the size of the student body from 800 in a class to about 1000 per class by adding women.

Although the male-female ratio in the first co-ed class was an overwhelming ten-to-one, Dartmouth's alumni still did a lot of kicking and screaming about the presence of women on campus.

The storm has pretty much died out by now, although a die-hard core of alumni and members of Dartmouth's originally all-male senior class remain irrevocably opposed to co-education. And Dartmouth is likely to remain a male-dominated institution. It has a vice president for womens' affiars and the male-female ratio has crept up to four-to-one, but is likely to remain there for the foreseeable future.