Penn

The University of Pennsylvania has an entity called the College for Women, but it is hard to figure out what it is there for. Evidently, Penn administrators have been asking the same questions, and are planning a merger to take effect next fall.

Both the College for Women and the College for Men are under the rubric of a faculty of Arts and Sciences, and all courses are open to both men and women. Unlike Harvard, though, Penn has other undergraduate colleges--of Engineering and Applied Science, Nursing, Allied Medical Professions, and the Wharton School of Business and Finance--all of which have their own faculties and admit both men and women.

Admissions to liberal arts programs is handled by a joint admissions office for both the College for Men and the College for Women. There are no quotas as such, but somehow the male-female ratio always seems to turn out to be about two-to-one in recent years.

Women students register together with men, but hand in the Penn equivalent of study cards separately. Certain advising and counseling services are also conducted separately and there is a special dean for each school. All dorms are co-ed with the exception of one voluntarily all-female floor.

One thing that Penn has that Harvard probably should have, is an academic women's studies program. The two-year-old version at Penn is rapidly growning, although it is a bastion of female separatism with only a couple of men ever taking its courses--though there are no formal restrictions.

All together, the issues of merger, admissions ratios and the role of a women's college seem to have passed Penn's 7500 undergraduates by, though the consciousness about women's issues outside the campus appears to be very high.

Princeton

Legend has it that in 1969, April 15 found the Princeton admissions office with two separate sets of envelopes ready to go out: one set offering admission to the college's first women applicants, the other telling them that the Board of Trustees had decided against admitting women. Since that last-minute decision to go co-ed four and a half years ago, the course of co-education at Princeton has been remarkably smooth and unhurried.

It culminated last year in the institution of a policy of equal access admissions, meaning no more quotas. Until last year, Princeton abided by an informal promise it had made to the alumni that there would be at least 800 men in each freshman class, increasing the number of women at the college simply by increasing the class size. There are now about 1100 students in each class, as opposed to 800 in 1969--that means the ratio of men to women for the college as a whole is now about the same as at Harvard--2.5:1.

Having bypassed the opposition to co-education posed by a rather fierce and very conservative alumni group, Princeton seems content with the situation. Nobody is pushing or even considering either sex-blind admissions or a 1:1 quota. Some women on campus feel that the admissions office is not recruiting women as actively as it should, with the result that the number of applications from women has not increased this year. And the ratio is not likely to change much in the next few years. But for now, those women are not planning any protest or action on the issue, beyond helping the admissions office with its recruiting.

Although there is a Women's Center, which the first women students set up five years ago, the only burning issue related to co-education on campus is in the area of women's athletics. As has been the case here, women athletes have had to arrange their scheducles around those of men athletes. This has been changing, gradually, but not fast enough as far as many students are concerned.

As one student put it, "If there's any conflict between a big men's sport and the women's equivalent, the women get it in the neck."

But aside from sports, there is little contoversy over co-education at Princeton these days. The alumni were The Enemy; both students and administration fought them, and finally just learned to ignore them, abandoning the promise to keep a quota of 800 men per class.

That battle apparently united the students and the administration. There seems to be no need for any administrative offices or structures dealing especially with women, or for committees considering policy changes, and only a tiny fraction of the women at Princeton have shown any interest in the Women's Center. And even the women at the Center have few gripes and say they do not feel Princeton is a male-dominated institution. As one of the Center's staffers put it, "This place definitely has a co-ed feel."